[adrusi]

In addition to AnimalMuppet's point, shell scripts make no attempt to be cross platform, so you don't get any awkward leaky abstractions when trying to interact with low-level system facilities.

The primitives in shell scripts are the primitives of the operating system. The fundamental building blocks of your language are strings and files and processes, which makes it really convenient to work with strings and files and processes, AKA the operating system.

[AndyKelley]

You can easily invoke platform-specific binaries from within a scripting language. You can even invoke them in a shell if you want. Check out this API: https://docs.python.org/3/library/subprocess.html#subprocess...

[yarrel]

If most of your scripting language code is calls to other programs and to the shell, there's a simpler way...

[adrusi]

Well of course you can. Scripting languages aren't useless stunted toys. The point is that if that's what most of your program is doing, you'll have a lot more success using a language where that functionality is first class.