I encountered bugs and had to fix glaring problems in shell scripts literally everywhere I worked.

Most devs are not deeply steeped in Unix, and don't really know what they're doing with this as it's not their main job. They kinda clobber something together that "kinda works" – right up to the point it doesn't.

There is no shame in that; I do that with some stuff too – we all do – because there is no point learning something in-depth if you use it once a year. This is not a "zomg devs are stoopid" rant, it's just an observation of fact.

I've written tons of shell scripts and and I love how it enables you to do something useful very quickly in very little code. Last week I hacked together a "ncurses"-type terminal music player in less than 200 lines which actually works fairly well, which I thought wasn't too bad for an evening of work.

But in general I distrust other people's shell scripts, and I found that 9 times out of 10 that's warranted. I tend to push for zsh as it fixes the most egregious footguns and limitations, but there's still plenty of things to do wrong, and the syntax can be unfamiliar.

People who say stuff like this must not have worked on enough Linux environments. Bash scripts aren't fully portable, and there are absolutely differences in environments which prevent portability of bash scripts. Since using Nix, I've realized the number of bash scripts which are only superficially portable are drastically higher than the number which are actually portable. As one trivial example, how many bash scripts use the more portable shebang of `#!/usr/bin/env bash`? Extremely few. And every one which hard codes `#!/bin/bash` has created a less portable script most likely without ever having realized it. Guess they are all muppets though right?

Not true. Bash is filled with foot guns. In fact even HN has articles hitting the front page every other month about another bash footgun and how to avoid it. Any Muppet can write a bash script to do the thing, but only somebody with a lot of bash and unix experience can make sure it's dodging the hundreds of common and obvious but incorrect way of doing things.

No security concerns with your projects either! ;)

Unfortunately, the world's full of muppets, present company not excluded.

For everyday bash usage, sure.

But I worked with an extremely bash-skilled guy at IBM many years ago who went out of his way to write his scripts in the most arcane way possible. On purpose.

It was his form of job security, from rough memory when I asked wtf?. ;)

I wasn't project lead on that one, so we just had to put up with it... :(

I would have disagreed (obscure syntax thats hard to memorize if you write bash rarely) but LLMs have really removed all of that