[rbonvall]

In my opinion, shell scripting is the right tool when you need to do a lot of calling programs, piping, and redirecting. Such programs end up being cumbersome in "proper" languages.

[skydhash]

If there are already software written to do the stuff and I'm just coordinating them (no other computation other than string manipulation) I'd take bash every day. I would only reach to python if I need to do stuff like manipulating complex data structures or something with heavy logic.

[sulandor]

"you can do anything not matter how horrible you feel"

but yea, shell is foremost a composition language/environment