I've been moving away from using shell scripts in a tools/ directory to using Python Invoke (http://www.pyinvoke.org http://www.pyinvoke.org), which is the libr

I've been moving away from using shell scripts in a tools/ directory to using Python Invoke (http://www.pyinvoke.org http://www.pyinvoke.org), which is the library underlying fabric. I used bash scripts for years, but for a lot of reasons made the switch: - It was always painful to create small libraries of functions used across multiple scripts in a project - It's difficult to consistently configure them with per-user settings. I've written bash implementations of settings management, Invoke handles this for me. - I'd still have to reach for Python whenever I needed to do anything with arrays or dicts, etc. - Getting error handling correct can be a chore Invoke has a lot of nice to haves to: - Autogenerated help output - Autocomplete out of the box - Very easy to add tasks, just a Python function - Easy to run shell code when needed - Very powerful config management when needed - Supports namespacing, task dependencies, running multiple tasks at once and deduplicating them It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than my hand rolled scripts were.