Oh, right, because it's not easy to cause errors in Python.

Python stops on errors.

Bash may or may not. It depends on how your script was called. If your script is sourced you need to remember to set and restore the flags.

In bash your data can accidentally become code. "rm $fn" usually deletes one file, but it might one day delete a few (spaces), or wildcard expansion makes it delete many. With Python, calling the function to delete one file will always delete one file. Your function will never run with a "continue on errors" mode.

oh come on, whatever is feeding files to the function I'll just trick into using some other data with different files. you don't need to "execute data" to have substitution bugs.

and it's easy to add status checks to your shell script just like you can for Python. exceptions are not the only way to stop on error. but it's sure a hell of a lot easier to have a non-working program in Python, whereas it's a lot easier for a shell script to keep working.

Correct. Python code is unlikely to contain the kind of trivial variable manipulation errors that plague Bash scripts.

I have written my large share of bash scripts at this point in my life. However, I recently started a new project. I opened up a file and started noodling out a sh script. I stopped exactly because of what you are saying. I then installed powershell. I have not decided if I am going to use powershell, python or ansible yet for this. But as it is gluing a bunch of commands together with some string manipulation and some very simple math calculations powershell seems better for the job in this case.

Bash is also good at these things but it feels like you are using weird archaic tools to get things done. They work very well but the syntax on some of the commands you end up having to use are entire oriley books by themselves. It has its own odd way of doing things. Bash is nice for when you know you can not really manipulate the environment. As it is fully complete and usually 'table stakes' for what is installed. It is just kind of odd the way it works. In this case I decided to start with something that is more akin to what I am used to writing.