Agreed. Many/most of the shell scripts I've ever seen using 'bash' could be using the standard 'sh' instead; most need no changes at all, and the rest need just a few minor tweaks to eliminate non-POSIX-compliant behavior.
Since Debian and other distros now use the BSD-licensed `dash` as their default system shell (system, not user) I suspect they've become more motivated to reduce unnecessary bashisms in shell scripts. Debian's 'devscripts'[1] project includes a Perl script called 'checkbashisms'[2] which you can use to detect many of these common 'bashisms'.
For those of you running Ubuntu, you can install 'devscripts' with apt-get: sudo apt-get install devscripts
For those of you running FreeBSD, you can install 'devscripts' from the devel/devscripts port.
Since Debian and other distros now use the BSD-licensed `dash` as their default system shell (system, not user) I suspect they've become more motivated to reduce unnecessary bashisms in shell scripts. Debian's 'devscripts'[1] project includes a Perl script called 'checkbashisms'[2] which you can use to detect many of these common 'bashisms'.
For those of you running Ubuntu, you can install 'devscripts' with apt-get: sudo apt-get install devscripts
For those of you running FreeBSD, you can install 'devscripts' from the devel/devscripts port.
[1]: http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/devscripts.html
[2]: http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/devscripts....