If your primary consideration is that it's generally available on a random developer's machine, what are the options? IOW out of the box on OSX and the major Linux distributions, and readily available on Windows.

Python is pretty safe, but your code would have to work with both 2 & 3 and not pull in any external dependencies. And recommended practices have changed so drastically on how to install Python over the years that a random dev could have theirs in a fairly weird state.

Perl would work, but hacked-together Perl has the similar drawbacks to hacked-together Bash, especially when it's me doing the coding.

Ruby has problems similar to Python.

Make & awk have problems similar to Perl & Bash.

Therefore my latest rust package contains bash scripts.