> something simple and small (<50 LOC). If it's complicated or large, you should just write it in a proper programming language anyway.

Regardless of LOC, eject from bash/awk as soon as you need a data structure, and choose a better language.

Yeah, that's a good point. It's less about LOC than complexity (data structures, complicated string parsing, handling binary data, etc). And that's actually the advice I follow myself.

Some longish Bash scripts are very maintainable and reliable, because they're still quite regular and simple.