>But for quick hacky stuff manipulating the filesystem a lot, Perl has many more features built into the language. Things like regex syntax, globing directories

>But for quick hacky stuff manipulating the filesystem a lot, Perl has many more features built into the language. Things like regex syntax, globing directories, back ticks to execute Unix commands All good points. >you can use it directly from the command line as a one liner. You can do all these (except the last one?) in Python You can use Python from the command line too, but Perl has more features for doing that, like the -n and -p flags. Then again, Python has the fileinput module. Here's an example: http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2013/05/convert-multiple-text-files-to-pdf-with.html http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2013/05/convert-multiple-text-file...