RTFM. I have never met a shell user who has read `man bash` from top to bottom. It's not a hard document to read if you have been using bash for a while. People read bits of it, as you do with other man pages, and get frustrated navigating it. But man bash should be read top to bottom with intent to understand it before complaining about it. It should be given the same attention to details that you give any programming language, not any gui tool (that you can exct to be intuitive) bash is a very powerful language and deserves 1 hour of you time to read the man. It you want to write good scripts

Read Google bash coding guidelines.

Try to write shells scripts that don't fork. That approach really helped me write resilient scripts.

Use

x=`${...}`. Instead of

echo |...

Then you bash starts to improve every day, instead of accepting mediocre all your life.%

I have given the above lesson to a few folk who suddenly found bash fun and a highly productive programming language.

Like all languages get it working first, make it testable and refactor until it's good.

With bash that whole process can take 5 mins for a simple script: and scripts should only be simple