Shell programming

I write stuff in shell because I know how to. After many years I've learned how to deal with many of the horrible things that go wrong, and with a couple of hours of dicking about can usually get what I wanted.

As with others if I know there will be a lot of data manipulation then I'll use perl instead, and know just enough to do that. I avoid writing in python because I don't know how, and worse don't know how to fill in the gaps.

If I'd started writing python 20 years ago things might be different (and I might be more productive - I like shell but I'm not going to claim that it's a _nice_ language)