While I still agree with everything I have ever said about learning
POSIX shell first, from a practical perspective I’m going back to
writing everything in Bash. Writing stuff in bash is worth it just for
the double-brackets alone, not to mention the non-shadowing options with
< to feed while loops. Then there are arrays, maps, indirect variable
referencing and more. I could argue that using these things makes bash
harder to read. I don’t give a shit. These constructs are so powerful,
and so available that not using them actually makes people wonder why
you aren’t using them — especially in the secops space. Bottom line:
bash makes you one powerful shell scripting mother fucker from your
single commands to 500 line bash script monstrosities. I’m done with
bash guilt. Bash is the next best thing to perl, but its the default
shell on most everything and when it’s not there, POSIX shell is just a
subset of bash and readily available, cognitively.