Perhaps he didn't deliver the point... but BASH is not a good or safe language to write to.

Writing to '/bin/sh' is understandable due to its ubiquitousness.

Bash is a superset that is not so ubiquitous, so it doesn't have the advantage that writing to /bin/sh does.

If you don't want portable, then don't write to shell script. Write to Perl Ruby or Python, which is also safer and more secure.

/bin/bash is on literally every machine I ever touch. It is on every Debian machine. It is on every Ubuntu machine. It is on every OS X machine. It is on every Windows (!) machine. And there are plenty of operations that are significantly more cumbersome to write in Ruby--otherwise, sure, I would do so. Backticks are nice, but there's no `set -e` (that I am aware of) and it becomes a huge hassle to do things in a smart, error-checking way.

No-one claimed Bash isn't widely distributed and installed by default.

However, unless you are patching and compiling the same version of Bash, you absolutely do not have the same version on all those machines, and that is the whole reason NOT to target Bash in shell scripts - its features are not always consistent/compatible across versions.

> /bin/bash is on literally every machine I ever touch. It is on every Debian machine. It is on every Ubuntu machine. It is on every OS X machine. It is on every Windows (!) machine.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. No (unless Cygwin is installed).

/bin/bash is on literally every machine I ever touch. Did you miss the operative phrase?

(I have init scripts for Cygwin, too, because I need Windows but life is too short for CSRSS.)

> /bin/bash is on literally every machine I ever touch. Did you miss the operative phrase?

You intended that subjunctive clause to apply to all the sentences, an intent I missed. My mistake. :)

This may soon become a tempest in a teapot, as patched Bash versions are now appearing. I just patched all my machines.