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There are certain things BASH is not very good at. There are certain tasks you shouldn't do in bash, unless you really, truly have to. It's often better to switch to a different language for most of these tasks.
Floating point math. Bash has only integer math. Use bc(1) or AWK instead.
- Associative arrays (coming in bash 4.0). Use AWK or perl or Tcl instead.
Fancy ProcessManagement. Bash has nothing analogous to select(2) or poll(2). Use C instead.