[adamnew123456]

If you're open to learning it, Tcl is actually a good middle ground here. The best way I can describe it is "structured shell script" - still very string oriented, but the syntax and command set is much more well thought out, and its better for building libraries in (having namespacing, among other things). You even have a choice among object systems if you need one.

You don't lose much in terms of shell interop though - the native exec command understands a lot of the basics (file redirection, pipelining, background execution). In the simplest case, it's just one more word:

  exec wget $URL

You do have simple exceptions too, which terminate by default unless you catch them (unfortunately, the stack traces aren't really useful). AFAIK exec throws on a non-zero exit, and you can use it in your own code too:

  # Dead
  error "IO error"

  # Not dead
  if {catch [error "IO error"] error_or_result} {
    # The error
    puts "Caught: $error_or_result"
  } else {
    # The result
    puts "OK: $error_or_result"
  }