[cevn]

In ruby you can just call out to the shell with backticks.

Like.

    myvar = `mycommand | sed 's/ugly/beautiful/g' | awk -F: '{print $2,$4}' 1> something.report 2> err.log`

That way, if something is easier in Ruby you do it in ruby, if something is easier in shell, you can just pull its output into a variable.. I avoid 99% of shell scripting this way.

[necheffa]

That is fair...

But if all I need to do is generate the report I proposed...why would I embed that in a Ruby script (or a Python script, or a Perl script, etc.) when I could just use a bash script?

[lostdog]

Bash scripts tend to grow to check on file presence, conditionally run commands based on the results of other commands, or loop through arrays. When it is a nice pipelined command, yes, bash is simpler, but once the script grows to have conditions, loops, and non-string data types, bash drifts into unreadability.