I just finished my second year as a university CS student, so my "real-world" knowledge is lacking.  I learned Java my first year, continued with Java and picked up C and simple Bash 
scripting my second.  This summer I'm trying to learn Perl (God help me).  I've dabbled with Python a bit in the past.
My question is, now that we have very readable, very writable scripting languages like Python, Ruby, Perl, etc, why does anyone write Bash scripts?  Is there something I'm missing?  I know my linux box has perl and python.  Are they not ubiquitous enough?  Is there really something
that's easier to do in Bash than in some other hll?
If you do lots of GUI stuff, you'll probably only meet bash whenever you're doing some sort of customization on your own machine. Various hacks and stuff. If you use the command line to do stuff, bash is just indispensable. In fact, being good on the command line requires bash or some other shell familiarity.
I get miles out of having learned Bash when I wanted to navigate around my harddrive quickly. I wrote a navigation/menu interface that let me beam to different folders and files quickly and easily. Writing it in bash was simple and easy. And there's lots of easily accessed, and free, stuff that'll show you how.
Also, learning Bash is great for understanding how Unix and some of the core stuff really works -- and how far we've come with tools like Python.
Is there any use for Bash scripting anymore?