I currently do my textfile manipulation through a bunch of badly remembered AWK, sed, Bash and a tiny bit of Perl.
I've seen mentioned a few places that python is good for this kind of thing. How can I use Python to replace shell scripting, AWK, sed and friends?
One reason I love Python is that it is much better standardized than the POSIX tools.  I have to double and triple check that each bit is compatible with other operating systems.  A program written on a Linux system might not work the same on a BSD system of OSX.  With Python, I just have to check that the target system has a sufficiently modern version of Python.
Even better, a program written in standard Python will even run on Windows!
How to implement common bash idioms in Python?