Common shell script mistakes (2008)
Bash is the love of my life! I have been working for years on this problem now (not full-time of course), gradually moving in the direction of finally being able to challenge this:"Inappropriate useshell is the main domain specific language designed to manipulate the UNIX abstractions for data and logic, i.e. files and processes. ... Correspondingly, please be wary of writing scripts that deviate from these abstractions, and have significant data manipulation in the shell process itself. While flexible, shell is not designed as a general purpose language and becomes unwieldly when ... "Another person has actually solved the most important show stopper already: http://ctypes.sh.What now remains to be solved, are a few minor, additional details, and then simply writing a good manual of how to very successfully use bash as a general-purpose language.My personal belief is that everything that you can do in other scripting languages, you can also do in Bash, only better.