[m463]

I think when you have a very-well-written bash script, it starts to get pretty close to python in size, but python wins in readability. A well written bash script will handle errors cleanly, will not die on quoting problems, and can use complex data structures or objects when data handling gets hairy.

When you use regexes, letting python use them directly seems to be much cleaner than quoting and passing them to awk/sed/grep or other text processing tools.

Additionally, python seems to have libraries to handle all kinds of input like json and csv.

One thing that python doesn't do as naturally as bash is invoke commands. For python I usually include some functions to run commands passed as a list, and check the return code or return the output. then 'cmd -f $arg1' becomes myrun('cmd','-f', arg1)

[elmolino89]

Stringing up a pipe with a mix of awk, tr, sed, cut, sort, uniq etc. is certainly not more readable than a Python script with comments not invoking any of these but using Python's data structures, or even data frames/SQL.