If you violate general Go programming standards and write code that panics rather than erroring, because a lot of time in shell scripts "bail out loudly the instant anything goes wrong" actually is the error handling you want (that's all "set -e" is in shell in the end, after all), Go is still not a great shell language, but it's tolerable if you have advanced usages. Being able to use all the io.Reader & io.Writer based code can help you do certain very advanced things relatively nicely.

But you need to be doing something seriously funky for it to be worth it and cross into the positive in the cost/benefits analysis. I actually have a service that does this, doing some fairly sophisticated stuff with git repos and what is in them. But it's certainly not something I reach for because Go am best languages for all task.

It's absolutely idiomatic to use panic in main. In fact, that's basically the only place it's allowed in "Go programming standards."

> positive in the cost/benefits analysis

not needing to learn and master another lang for scripting looks like significant pros to me. I am actually using java for my scripting because of that, which is stranger choice than golang.