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Thank you for sharing this; I infrequently have to write standalone shell scripts but every time I do I spend a while looking around for best practices and often just end up with some contradicting opinions.

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There's also this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6866085

And the Google 'Shell Style Guide': https://google.github.io/styleguide/shell.xml

Just in case you hadn't seen them already.

Just for the record, the Google guide focuses on Google infrastructure and systems, not portability. Using /bin/bash for instance is not a good idea if you want to port your work to BSD systems.

Which you probably don't care about.

Bash isn't even a good choice if you want to support just macOS and Linux, because the versions available are so wildly different.

1) supporting both macOS and Linux in bash is trivial. Just stick to Bash 3 functionality.

2) Bash4 is trivial to install on macOS via home brew, so saying “available” is a misnomer. “Default” would be a bit better, but many Linux distros still in use don’t use Bash4.

3) Bash 3 vs 4 isn’t “wildly” different.

I usually refer to http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ , which is what anyone on #bash IRC channel would recommend.

Good luck!

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