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Same here, a bunch of complex & dependent tasks all boiled down to a few commands run often, and a bunch more less so.

I also use grunt-shell a great deal rather than find/write a new plugin, pretty decent way to call out to bash.

Show me one task in your Gruntfile that is complex. grunt-shell also just wraps child_process.spawn which is already trivial.

If it's more than several lines, I write it out in a separate bash/js script and use grunt to call it, via shell or require() depending.

Not saying it's better than make or something else, but it's easy for everyone on the team to use & modify.