[unpythonic]

The effortless composition of complex commands out of simple standalone programs is one of the best features of Unix. And yes, I admire and love it as well.

That said, imagine a metrics system for a huge networking company that used these methods to cover all automated testing or defect analysis. Those inner loops were made of greps and seds and so forth, and each one is the invocation of a new program. It wasn't uncommon for these runs to take almost a day.

Besides performance, the other nightmare was was someone described below: each script was a one-off that didn't leverage the work from others. If the author only new C shell, then you know you're going to be doing gymnastics to catch the stderr of some of those programs (you can't capture it in the same manner that Bourne variants do).

Anyway, yes, we all adore the Unix philosophy, but there are limits.