i try to push shell as far as it reasonably goes. for most tasks, sh, find, grep, sed, and cut is more than enough. only when things become truly complex or painfully slow do i reach for another language.

i used to care a lot about strict portability, but in practice i only run my scripts on macos and #openbsd. that simplifies things: if shellcheck is happy, i'm happy. i'm 99% sure my scripts work on other unix-like systems, but i don't feel the need to check.

what really draws me to shell is that it's always there. it's part of the base system, requires no extra installation, and the runtime has been stable for decades. that stability translates directly into confidence: shell scripts feel future-proof.

i know i can run something like ssg.sh ten years from now and it will still work --- certainly on #openbsd, and hopefully on macos too. there's no dependency churn, no worrying about the "right" version of python or ruby, and no hoping the ecosystem hasn't moved on.

it just runs.

Alt...

built with /bin/sh