This is really a matter of personal style. The point of this approach is that if you want to break out Python or whatever, it integrates with the rest of it ju

This is really a matter of personal style. The point of this approach is that if you want to break out Python or whatever, it integrates with the rest of it just like any of the "built-in" programs. It's usually quicker for me to iterate on building up a complex program using existing command-line tools -- up to a point. After that point, I switch to something like Node or Python. One reason it's faster is that they're designed to be composable. They're flexible in just the right ways -- record separators, output formats, and key behaviors (like inverting the sense of a filter or whatever) -- to be able to perform a variety of tasks, but not so flexible that you need a lot of boilerplate, as with more general-purpose languages. They defer unrelated tasks (like sorting) to tools designed for that, keeping concerns separate. Take an awk script that reads whitespace-separated fields as input and transforms that, adding a header at the top and a summary at the end. awk's got a really nice syntax for these common tasks, and at the end you're left with a program where nearly all of the code is part of the specific problem you're trying to solve, not junk around requiring modules, opening files, looping, parsing, and so on.