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And that's the problem with bash scipting - very quickly it gets very cryptic, difficult to follow and understand without knowing various "clever tricks" and gimmicks. This is all fine and dandy for personal usage but god forbid other developers might need to changes something inside this kind "clever" code.

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Bingo. I am a pretty casual level scripter. My programming is always just a means to an end (usually biology related) and I would much rather write easy to read code that takes 30 secs to run than whatever the pure bash thing in the parent post is.

I feel the code above is clearly a bastardization, which is possible in several languages. Not to discount your point in the many bashisms, but that example is definitely not what's wrong with scripting.

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