If your problem can be solved neatly with some combination of existing shell utilities, and you just need a bit of glue to join them together, bash is great. T

If your problem can be solved neatly with some combination of existing shell utilities, and you just need a bit of glue to join them together, bash is great. The huge weakness of bash is the data mangling that is more complicated than a relatively simple per-row transformation. Splitting, joining, sorting, min/max of data structures like arrays, lists and trees are trivial in python, not so in bash. If it's not trivially seddable, and awk doesn't help either because you have to rearrange tree like structures, you are about to experience a massive pain, because it's out of scope of even expertly used associative arrays and you will find yourself reinventing the wheel hard using pretty basic tools. TLDR; As soon as you need to use something more complex than a for loop, switch to Python.