Reason number 650 why I love Ruby: it offers ridiculously gradual transitions from shell scripts. One time I built up a pretty weighty conditional-heavy script

Reason number 650 why I love Ruby: it offers ridiculously gradual transitions from shell scripts. One time I built up a pretty weighty conditional-heavy script in Bash and didn't want to keep adding to it. So I simply made all the bash calls use backticks. Took me all of a few minutes to get option parsing working again. One day I'll learn the Ruby way of doing shell one-liners and that'll hopefully keep me out of man pages for that sort of thing forever.