[freedomben]

I'll definitely agree that it can get out of hand. If it's a script/tool that will have many eyes on it and people that need to understand it, bash tools probably aren't the best way to go. I usually turn to ruby in those cases. But even for one off commands, I find myself using pipes like that all the time and I'm the only one that will ever see it, so if it's greek it's no problem :-)