is it? In practice I find that my shell one liners are orders of magnitude more complex than what I would dare to write in any other 'proper' language: grep

is it? In practice I find that my shell one liners are orders of magnitude more complex than what I would dare to write in any other 'proper' language: grep "hello ($(cat patterns.txt| tr '\n' '|'|grep ')$^)" <(ssh other.host "cat ~/file.txt") |tee >(grep 'a' >As.txt) >(grep 'b' > Bs.txt) [yes, gratuitous use of cat, sue me]