Good question. I can think of two tasks for which I routinely use the shell, and wouldn't really prefer one of the newer scripting languages: 1. Customizing my

Good question. I can think of two tasks for which I routinely use the shell, and wouldn't really prefer one of the newer scripting languages: 1. Customizing my interactive shell, although I personally favor zsh over bash. I write shell functions and automate PATH setting and discovery where possible, so knowing how to script the startup file helps. 2. Startup scripts for software I distribute. Perl or Python would work, but then I would have to be careful about which version of the language to use. With /bin/sh, as long as I use purely POSIX constructs (which means no arrays, unfortunately), scripts work anywhere.