[jrg]

It's painful to watch Unix SAs who don't understand shell scripts (which are, after all, a way of automating repetitive command-line tasks), because it is such an essential part of understanding the OS and how it works.

I think it is important to know when to use a quick shell script, and when to solve the problem with some Perl (or even some C.) Sometimes it is quicker to throw together a shell script, with a bit of sed, awk, or some simple for loops, automating the command line you just manually ran a moment ago; sometimes it's best to solve the problem by switching to some Perl.