Are you annoyed by all the weird error handling characteristics of bash? You might wish to take a look at https://skarnet.org/software/execline/index.html or, if you desire compatibility, https://www.oilshell.org/
@robryk Cool stuff, but kinda seems to miss the point of most people using (to a lesser extent ba)sh -- it's everywhere. If you assume you can install arbitrary software then Python is already kinda an acceptable scripting solution, innit?
@robryk Hm, fair. Still, it's a very (surprizingly) niche usecase I feel.
@timorl Also, why don't people write things like init scripts in Python in that case? Python dependency would be a nonissue in many cases.
@timorl If you want to do standard shell things (like pipes), then Python is cumbersome (and lets you rediscover funny edge cases that are normally handled by the shell -- I'm not aware of a Python library that helps with that).