# Bash 171 Hacker News commenters recommended Bash and 127 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 20 years (7 owners). **Verdict:** The go-to shell for gluing commands, pipes and files together, available on nearly every machine, though full of footguns and painful once scripts grow complex. ## Why people recommend it - Excellent glue for commands, pipes (6 comments): "For the things shell is good at (running other commands, pipes, and shuffling files), I have yet to find anything even close to as good." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50044555)) "the philosophy of simple composable tools tied together with the Unix shell has proven remarkably difficult to improve upon" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49756494)) "Weird footguns don't matter if you stick to using shell for control flow, composition, and interpolation" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48706632)) - Available everywhere, long lifespan (4 comments): "it's still incredibly useful as it's everywhere and has a far greater lifespan than almost anything else" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48990812)) "I've seen enough broken python installs (even with stdlib) to put my faith in /dev/tcp working in bash" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48562935)) "there’s a high likelihood that these tools will always be available on any machine" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48991855)) - Concise, flexible one-liners (4 comments): "bash can also express concurrency easily, with sync and async support for each command" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49989535)) "You can often make oneliners that would traditionally be a lot of lines in Python." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46536161)) "Though bash is not a good programming language, it's indeed flexible for CLI apps." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47284292)) - Stable for decades (3 comments): "vim and bash, unlike some software, doesn't just go and change its config every few years!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48741026)) "I've been happy with Bash, Vim, JetBrains products and Terraform for a very long while." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46716681)) "Bash has added very few features beyond what was already quasi-standard in UNIX shells." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48321145)) ## What people warn about - Arcane rules and dangerous footguns (7 comments): "BASH is a nightmare for bugs and foot-guns unless you make a point of defensive coding" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46529948)) "bash to me is the C++ of scripting. There are a bunch of arcane rules which all have to be followed, forget a single one of them and you've got a vulnerability." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46441335)) "Yes, Bash or any shell is a very complex and utterly environment dependent language to approach with all due care for security and compatibility" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48873946)) - Breaks down for complex scripts (4 comments): "the language (being an sh descendant) is honestly horrible for anything more complex than 200-300 lines" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46511334)) "It's so bad that the moment I need even the slightest bit of complexity, I will switch away from bash." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47186043)) "as soon as you require custom data manipulation in any form, you'll run into awkward edge cases" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46433097)) - Portability and version inconsistencies (3 comments): "A real problem with bash in particular is that it had many incompatible features which were masked with bash's POSIX mode." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48714075)) "the bash you get on MacOS is bash 3.2 released in 2006 so relying on it for portability might not be a good idea" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45993383)) "Yes, Bash or any shell is a very complex and utterly environment dependent language to approach with all due care for security and compatibility" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48873946)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [PowerShell](https://hackerapproved.com/p/powershell.md): 156 recommend - [fish shell](https://hackerapproved.com/p/fish-shell.md): 97 recommend - [Nushell](https://hackerapproved.com/p/nushell.md): 92 recommend - [zsh](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zsh.md): 52 recommend - [Xonsh shell](https://hackerapproved.com/p/xonsh.md): 15 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Bash", https://hackerapproved.com/p/bash/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).