Bash 5.2 released

Yeah, I I have to agree. I've deployed a lot of minimum Bourne compatability scripts to run across 6 or 7 Unix variants, and it was a lot less painful to do system instrumentation fact gathering in shell than it would have been in c, it was still a lot of sunk time to properly validate them, even with a decade of accumulated knowledge. And even there I couldn't really rely on every aspect of a posix environment being available.

Everything I've done since, just putting bin/bash at the script start was fine. They were only ever going to run on Linux in cloud land, and usually the startup overhead of bash was overshadowed by being able to kill off lots of forks.

That said, I generally prefer the pain of automating in python so that failures are explicitly caught and fixed by default. Shell for me is more of a tool for doing immediate work. Testing some park of things, doing something 100 times while sniffing for failures that probably makes no sense to put on a test, etc, ie scripts you throw away. And for that, bash and zsh type things still feel good.