Why POSIX sh? Bash is everywhere. I once in my career had access to and needed jobs performed on a mainframe with AIX running. It had bash, it had ruby, it had day, it had fish shell. I couldn't and can't understand why people insist on asceticism (Korn shell, POSIX sh) when nicer options are available.

Eh, I simply don't need bash.

Every few dozen scripts or so I'll change the shebang to bash to have more than 1 array, but other than that I seldom pine anything that it has to offer. I believe it's a bloated mess along with most GNU utils, so avoiding it is partially out of spite, but I wouldn't impair my code to do so.

*zsh ... Not "day"

dash is 10% of the size of bash. You don't need the interactive features when running shell scripts, and the few "extra" features are pretty crap anyway (arrays? yeah right).

"Thirteen Incorrect Ways and Two Awkward Ways to Use Arrays"

http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/11/06.html

Yeah I should clarify; I think it's well past the time of sh.

Still, sh is unrivaled for portability and brevity/velocity; I wouldn't swap virtually any the shell scripts I've written for python scripts. I think sh is a decent and often well-suited tool if you can manage to wield it properly (not a straightforward endeavor).

I look forward to checking out oilshell though, so thank you~

Edit: FWIW for arrays in POSIX sh I generally only use:

  set -- a b c
  echo $#
  echo "$1"
  shift
  echo "$@"

Once in a blue moon "$*" or maybe an unquoted $@. See 2.5.2 of https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V... (My go-to reference)