A gentle admonishment to use shell scripts where appropriate accept that shell scripts will appear in your codebases and to lean heavily on automated tools, modern features, safety rails, and best practices whenever possible.

Using the Awk programming language, you can manipulate or extract data, generate reports, match patterns, perform calculations, and more, with great flexibility. Awk allows you to accomplish somewhat difficult tasks with a single line of code. To achieve the same results using traditional programming languages such as C or Python would require additional effort and many lines of code.

Shell Files and Interpreter Invocation
Environment
Comments
Formatting
Features and Bugs
Naming Conventions
Calling Commands
Conclusion

Fail fast, fail noisy.