&gt; If seeing the above hacks has inspired anyone to write a program in a real language rather than sh&#x2F;Bash&#x2F;whatever, or to fix corner case bugs arising from the badness of the shell language, I will be happy.<p>What languages does the rest of HN consider to be good alternatives to shell? When I try writing scripts in Python I find myself missing string interpolation and redirection&#x2F;piping syntax. I tried to learn Perl but I fount it to be too quirky for my tastes. In the end I always come back to sh, even though I know I will regret it later.