> Though.. what if I told you the above four lines could be replaced by just... one?

I'd reject the pull request. Bash is already bad as programming language (the goodness of language for long code is inversely proportional to how nice it is for shell one-liners), this is just turning "bad" into "line noise"

If your bash script takes more than one screen, rewrite it in Python, hell, rewrite it in Perl, even that's better

Stupidly terse code is fun and a good laugh to show to people as a puzzle… it is the opposite in an application that relies on it.