It’s here, it’s there, it’s everywhere. The problem with replacing things that work with something “better” is that “better” is subjective, so you end up with a new “better” way every few years, and maintaining existing systems becomes a god awful slog. See the JavaScript ecosystem.

The bash I wrote 10 years ago still works today, and it will still work in 10 more years. The same bash will very likely work on your computer, on a remote server, etc. This is the power of not chasing “better” all the time.

Try running a Ruby or Node program from 10 years ago today on your computer. Now, try running it on a random Linux server.

Please do not take this as a slight against Ruby or Node, or any other high level programming language. Bash compared to those is simply apples and oranges, they are not the same thing.

By all means, if you have a project that requires a Ruby runtime anyway, write operational scripts with Ruby, run them with Rake, etc.

Want a portable script that doesn’t depend on a complex runtime? Use bash.

If bash is too limiting, use Perl. No, seriously. Perl is fine. It is about as ubiquitously available as bash, and the standard library likely has what you need to get the job done. People blindly dismiss Perl because some blog post told them to, usually in the context of writing application code. You’re not writing application code, you’re writing scripts. Would you write an application with bash? No.

why are you stuck with bash? just write a shebang and then your interpreter in the first line of your script.

i can use bash, python, lua and al kinds of stuff…

i don’t understand the question. if you mean, why does my shell only accept bash syntax, if i set my shell to bash, idk. use another shell?

‘sh’ is kind of the smallest common thing that’s available everywhere. so when you got to script something that needs to run somewhere not under your control, you use ‘sh’. and that’s kind of it works. you’ll find something, that’s been around for some time, otherwise it won’t have spread everywhere. and now you can’t replace it in newer products, because there is so much stuff using it.

if that isn’t one of your problems, go with my first suggestions and just use python or something like that as your scripting language.

POSIX compliance for the most part. Which is meant to give you a consistent API you can write software against that will work on any UNIX system. At least that is the theory behind it. It basically acts as a lowest common denominator for UNIX systems. Want to write a script that will work on all systems - bash or a similar shell will almost certainly be present.

A new system can change this if they wanted to. But then they won’t be able to take advantage of all the existing bash scripts out there that everyone is writing. Which adds a lot of friction to adoption.

So in a way we are locked into a bash like shell now. Unless you can get a lot of distros to change this shell it is very hard to change it for a single one. And changing something so fundamental across lots of distros will upset a lot of people that are used to bash.

And shells overall are preferred to general purpose programming languages as their main focus is executing other commands and piping input/output from one to another or to/from files. Something most programming languages make a bit awkward as that is not their focus.

There are a bunch of non-POSIX shells, like fish, nushell, ion etc but these will likely not become the default anytime soon due to the inertia that bash has. But luckjly you can install what ever shell or language you want in addition to bash and switch to that for your interactive shell or even scripting if you want to. They just won’t become the defaults for a long time - if ever.

I know I am reviving an old thread, but my philosophy is that posts are timeless and age should not be a reason not to respond.

Currently I am in the project of learning Rust and Raku, because I am interested in becoming a better systems programmer and I want to be able to do things for my computer without hitting a wall when a solution does not exist, or simply to master my second home.

This is a mindset issue. There is a lot of legacy opinions on how to use your computer, but never forget it is YOUR computer. I say never worry about something being portable to others. What you make will be portable to you, and that is all that matters. Make your computer yours. If someone wants to use your computer but can’t, isn’t that a win?

Check out xonsh.

Bash is fine. Now powershell, that’s utter garbage.