I guess the example I gave you was a one-liner but I didn't intend to constrain it to such. Just a week or two ago I wrote a 33-line script (that seems to fall

I guess the example I gave you was a one-liner but I didn't intend to constrain it to such. Just a week or two ago I wrote a 33-line script (that seems to fall squarely in your "small-to-medium" category) to calculate the minimal set of packages I need to install on Ubuntu in order to obtain the same set of packages I have right now. 28 of those 33 lines were an awk script consisting of three /PATTERN/{} blocks and one END{} block. It seemed about as simple as it could possibly be, and doing it in Python would've probably been twice as verbose.