I second Perl. You can learn enough Perl in a week to write neato sed/grep/awk type programs and shell script tupe stuff to outfit your command line however yo

I second Perl. You can learn enough Perl in a week to write neato sed/grep/awk type programs and shell script tupe stuff to outfit your command line however you like. Also... it's a good investment because your tools will run on any platform. You can soak up a measure of Unix culture as you go and you'll pick up a swiss-army-chainsaw that you can use when your usual dev tools don't cut it. Going up to the next level in Perl has a larger learning curve than you might expect... but the "low hanging fruit" are very easy to get the hang of.