> Yes I agree bash could have done this. But the bash codebase is very fragile and things often break. The maintainers are very concerned about breakage.

True, but that's not a good reason for such a used application. It has been around for 40 years, I think it literally has trillions of runtime hours. It's used on billions of systems, most likely.

It's exactly the place where you'd create a super comprehensive test suite that covers <<everything>> (see SQLite) and then re-architect it to make it robust.

I wonder if it's due to lack or money or due to something else.