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That assumes you care about portability. Not everybody does.

Writing portable software is difficult, and doing it for shell scripts even more so. Blindly pursuing portability for its own sake is not worth it. Weigh the cost of portability against the odds that the software will ever run on different systems.

For me personally it is never worth it to write my personal programs portably. This would require that I test them on different systems that I do not even use. Pointless.



It’s not so much a portability thing IMO as it is a utility thing. If I have a newer bash in my PATH than what is in /bin/bash, I want to use it.




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