It looks more like Go code than a bash script - the tradeoff we settled on is that pretty much as soon as you need to add any sort of logic it's no longer really a simple "script" and you _know_ it's just going to grow into a monstrosity. Better to use a language with real functions, real error handling, that you can actually unit test, etc. In that sense, I guess you could say we write lots of little tools moreso than we write scripts.

For something of this form, if the standard library has the functionality, we us it - os.Mkdir() instead of `mkdir` and so on. But to simplify shelling out, we have a little library that includes the interface

  type Runner interface {
	Execute(dir, name string, args ...string) (*CmdOutput, error)
  }

so it's easy enough to call miscellaneous programs and get the exit code / stdout / stderr. It also supports printing and executing a command, etc.

Iteratively executing a program of this form looks like `go run whatever --flag=value`, though your shebang hack looks like it'd also do nicely.