Yeah, if it feels like a transaction would be helpful, at least go for pl/sql and save yourself some pain. Bash is for system maintenance, not for business logic.

Heck, I wrote a whole monitoring system for a telephony switch with nothing more than bash and awk and it worked better than the shit from the manufacturer, including writing to the isdn cards for mobile messaging. But I wouldn’t do that again if I have an alternative.

We have dozens of bash scripts running table cleanups and maintenece tasks on the db. In the last 20 years these scripts where more stable than the database itself (oracle -> mysql -> postgres).

But in all fairness they just call the cliclient with the appropiate sql and check for the response code, generating a trap.