[ccashell]

I'm a sysadmin who does development on the side.

When I start writing something, I think about how big I expect it to be. If it's expected to be 50 lines or less, then it's bash for general scripts, and awk for text filtering. If it's expected to be more than 50 lines, I go with Perl. That goes regardless of platform (as it's already available on every *nix platform I use, and Strawberry or ActiveState makes Perl easy to add on Windows).