I'd love a good answer here. Shell is clunky and annoying as hell, but a "better" language like python is very verbose for typical shell stuff like process mana

I'd love a good answer here. Shell is clunky and annoying as hell, but a "better" language like python is very verbose for typical shell stuff like process management (processes, pipes, signal handling), small text handling tasks like regex matching or string splitting. Perl is maybe the closest here, but it certainly has it's fair share of annoyances, and I more or less dropped perl for python decades ago and don't particularly feel like going back.