Perl is a progression of that particular environment. It is a superset of shell/grep/awk/sed. A shell command works exactly as you would expect copied literall

Perl is a progression of that particular environment. It is a superset of shell/grep/awk/sed. A shell command works exactly as you would expect copied literally inside a backquote. With all the other goodies of a real programming langauge. Doing this in Python (to me atleast) seems unnatural.