Yes, that is precisely what I mean by trivial; the things needed are builtin to the Ruby/Python/Perl languages + standard class library, which makes it very eas

Yes, that is precisely what I mean by trivial; the things needed are builtin to the Ruby/Python/Perl languages + standard class library, which makes it very easy. > Is it "cheating" to do it this way? Should the shell be responsible for ... Depends on your goals. There is no absolute answer. If you just want to get things done fast, use Ruby. If you want to understand what Bash does, and learn more about systems programming, then do it the long way.