+1 Piping is great if you memorize the (often very different) syntax of every individual tool and memorize their flags, but in reality unless it's a task you'r

+1 Piping is great if you memorize the (often very different) syntax of every individual tool and memorize their flags, but in reality unless it's a task you're doing weekly, you'll have to go digging through MAN pages and documentation every time. It's just not intuitive. Still to date if I don't use `tar` for a few months, I need to lookup the hodge podge of letters needed to make it work. Whenever possible, I just dump the data in Python and work from there. Yes some tasks will require a little more work, but it's work I'm very comfortable with since I write Python daily. Your project looks like, but honestly iPython already lets me run shell commands like `ls` and pipe the results into real python. That's mostly what I do these days. I just use iPython as my shell.