[bitofhope]

There are workloads where shell scripts are the so-called right tool for a job. All too often I see people writing scripts in "proper" languages and calling os.system() on every other line. Shell scripts are good for gluing programs together. It's fine to use them for that.

[Spivak]

For me it's once you make switch to a "proper" language you realize how much lifting pipelines do when it comes to chaining external binaries together.

[sargstuff]

Heaping things together is better than letting things stack up/down.

[eschneider]

1000% THIS. The trick, of course, is knowing when it's time to abandon shell for something more powerful, but that usually comes with experience.

[GoblinSlayer]

I wrote such a program, that runs other programs for heavy lifting but also parses text which you can't possibly do in bash.

[sargstuff]

bootloader, systemd, or init ?

Parsing text isn't anything fancy.

It's just knowing what the marker is for a word/item boundary.

For bash, that marker is defined in IFS

[GoblinSlayer]

A build system for single file programs.