Bash Quick Start Guide

Choosing when to avoid Bash

Bash's design and development effort is less focussed on some other areas. New users who are keen to use Bash often find tasks that require the following to be difficult or impossible in the Bash language itself:

• Programs requiring speed: The end of the Bash manual page, under the "BUGS" section, reads: It's too big and too slow. This may seem like a joke, but while a compiled bash binary is unlikely to be more than a couple of megabytes in size, it is not optimized for speed. Depending on the task, reading a very large file line by line in Bash and processing data within it with string operations is likely to be significantly slower than using a tool such as sed or awk.

• Fixed or floating-point math: Bash has ...