Often it's a really nice and interesting exercise to approach a problem by thinking along the lines of: "This shell script is a bit complex. Instead of rewriti

Often it's a really nice and interesting exercise to approach a problem by thinking along the lines of: "This shell script is a bit complex. Instead of rewriting the shell script in another language, is there some simple and standalone way I could massage the data, in order to make the shell script simple again?" It's quite a lot like thinking like this: "This Python script is getting a bit slow. Instead of rewriting it in a faster language, is there some little part of it that I could isolate and only write that in a faster language?"