Sounds good although at that point it's just programming, and there are tools that are cleaner and faster and more robust than piping semi-structured strings ar

Sounds good although at that point it's just programming, and there are tools that are cleaner and faster and more robust than piping semi-structured strings around from a command line. The one real benefit that can be argued is ubiquity (on *ix). Not every system has Perl, Python, or Ruby installed - or Hadoop for that matter - but there's usually a programmable shell and some variant of the standard utilities that will get something done in a pinch. If it happens to be 200x faster than some enormous framework, so much the better.