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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

In my experience it tends to be at around 50 to 100 lines. At this point you usually encounter at least one "gotcha" or difficultly that bash can't handle in an elegant way and realize that it would probably be a lot faster if you just used another language instead.

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As soon as I start adding ifs and battling to remember the exact syntax I give up and move to Python and argparse. Recently I've started using the Begins[1] library to make useful command line tools and scripts even more quickly. I appreciate it's less and less portable at this stage but so much more productive. Most of the time these scripts are very specific anyway so it's not a concern.

The other thing I've noticed amongst peers is that I'm usually the only one (or one of a limited few) that remotely understand the shell script too. So I'd serve the team better writing it with Python. YMMV with that of course.

[1] http://begins.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Begins looks awesome, thanks for sharing! :)

Thanks for pointing to Begins!

I suspect some of this is just a difference in background or culture; shell conditionals look completely obvious and intuitive to me, and I'm pretty sure my team can handle shell better than python.

There is a lot of historical arcana baked into the command line and bash, but I've found it worth learning like any other language.

Anyway, just for future reference you can use bash's `help` command to get documentation about builtins. In the case of conditionals, we want to loo at `test`:

    $ help test

I find this a lot easier than wading through the bash man page.

Holy crap, xelxebar. Thank you! This is a game-changer. I've been wading through the bash man pages like a fool.

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