You can argue if bash is a good programming language or not, but you can’t argue that it is a programming language. However, there are a few oddities about it that make it different from most other languages you probably know. For one thing, variables are dynamically scoped. Second, you can easily change variables in an upper scope. This leads to a problem when you want to do something like reset your path:
#!/bin/bash #: This does NOT work PATH=/usr/bin:/bin
Well, actually, it does work; it just doesn’t work the way you imagine it might. The key is to realize that when you execute our script (say, resetpath), a new copy of bash runs. It inherits all the variables from your shell. Now the script sets PATH for the new copy of bash. Anything else you run in that script will see your change. But when the script exits, the new copy of bash is gone and the old copy sees the same old PATH it always did.
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