Interesting comment -- thanks for that. It also reminds me of one of my favorite aphorisms: "Perfect is the enemy of good enough". What some other commenters

Interesting comment -- thanks for that. It also reminds me of one of my favorite aphorisms: "Perfect is the enemy of good enough". What some other commenters appear to have missed is the use case I'm discussing here: scraping log files to generate text files to feed to gnuplot. And while the approach presented here may not work at Google scale, it works just fine for my situation. It takes me about 10 minutes on my MacBook to churn through around 50GB of logs to produce a few dozen charts. It took about a week to put the scripts together, and now anybody on my team with a shell prompt can do the same thing (including the QA folks). Sometimes you need to dot all the i's and cross all the t's, but sometimes it's just about getting the job done quickly, with minimal dependencies.