I'd say perl, but you could debate whether "ignored" really describes it. Something in that neighborhood (perhaps under-appreciated) does. I see people doing a

I'd say perl, but you could debate whether "ignored" really describes it. Something in that neighborhood (perhaps under-appreciated) does. I see people doing a lot of ugly shell pipelines and contortions with sed, awk, and bash that perl can do easier. Perl runs everywhere, usually already installed along sed/awk and friends, runs comparatively fast for a dynamic scripting language, has great documentation, and chews up and spits out the problem domain of sed, awk, and bash. It has the same command line switches on OS X, Linux, BSD, and even Windows.