Hacker News Reader

That is fair...

But if all I need to do is generate the report I proposed...why would I embed that in a Ruby script (or a Python script, or a Perl script, etc.) when I could just use a bash script?

View on HN

Bash scripts tend to grow to check on file presence, conditionally run commands based on the results of other commands, or loop through arrays. When it is a nice pipelined command, yes, bash is simpler, but once the script grows to have conditions, loops, and non-string data types, bash drifts into unreadability.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com