The Software Carpentry team has stressed the usefulness of shell scripting for years [1]. One nice feature is that the scripts are easily tested as they are dev

The Software Carpentry team has stressed the usefulness of shell scripting for years [1]. One nice feature is that the scripts are easily tested as they are developed. For example, biologists find this approach helpful for constructing large data processing pipelines [2]. Because the scripts are plain text, they play well with version control (e.g. git). The tools are free, well tested, and will work on most hardware. [1] http://swcarpentry.github.io/shell-novice/ http://swcarpentry.github.io/shell-novice/ [2] https://computingskillsforbiologists.com/ https://computingskillsforbiologists.com/