I reckon youll still be fighting with the shell syntax

I can type find | xargs pipes in my sleep.

doublechecking that the switches and utilities you got so used to in bash are actually present in the shell you need to run it on

Present in the shell? They’re external binaries; which shell you’re using is irrelevant. Maybe “present on the system,” except that if find, xargs and rm are not present, that is one very broken system. And the -print0/-0 switches are available on these commands on all Unixoid systems where I cared to look.

And all that is far more likely to be around than perl, in any case.

If your portability argument concerns moving between Windows and Unix, well, I can see how someone working on Windows would prefer to always use Perl… :-)

Makeshifts last the longest.