Some of these are why I bail for a “real language” in many seemingly simple scenarios.

As soon as I care about datetimes, it’s just easier to use stat() and a proper datetime API.

I can treat filenames as byte arrays and translate to Unicode or let the language do it for me.

In dire circumstances, find … -print0 | xargs -0 second_script is usually my fallback, but that has pitfalls as well.

Go has been a blessing there for me, not having to rely on a runtime across diverse hosts. But that’s a preference and doesn’t help on old kernels w/o epoll().

So many battle scars from inconsistency in Bash and GNU utilities over the years, especially on Unixes’ bundled versions (Solaris, etc) or supporting GNU, BSD, SysV, and HP-UX in the same script. Used to deploy a ksh88(ish) on all for SOME consistency.

Luckily now I’m not supporting anything but Linux anymore. When I can’t Go, then I just hijack some tool’s bundled Ruby (eg Puppet), Python, etc when I have to handle that and stick to the standard library.

I am too lazy to C these days like I used to. I’m usually dealing with an emergency (looking at you log4j) and don’t have the cycles to cover the gotchas there.