Decide whether a shell script is still appropriate based on size, data manipulation, control flow, and maintainability.
The move: keep shell small enough that its behavior is visible. Shell's sweet spot Use shell when the script mostly runs existing commands, wires files and streams together, and has simple branching. A wrapper around pg_dump, gzip, and aws s3 cp is a good shell script. The commands carry the complexity; shell supplies the coordination. The promote signals Promote when the script starts owning complex state: JSON manipulation without a dedicated tool, nested conditionals, many modes, retries with backoff, partial failure recovery, or data structures that shell cannot represent cleanly. At that point, Python, Go, Ruby, or Node will be…
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