&gt; Install perl&#x2F;python&#x2F;ruby and nodejs -- requiring just the shell to be installed?<p>I just meant using any one of them, not all of them. And you can pretty much always rely on python and perl being installed.<p>But my point is that if you&#x27;re doing something other than a one-off thing, then it belongs to some project and you&#x27;re probably going to commit that script to that project&#x27;s codebase. That means it has to be maintained. Do future you and whoever else has to maintain the project a favor and use one of the popular scripting languages that has reasonable syntax and semantics.