shell programming

In my job as a programmer I don't send a lot of time writing shell scripts, but when I do, it is because it will save me time. I tend to use perl for scripting because, well, I just do, but it serves the same purpose... to get something tedious done quickly.

I sometimes see other programmers slogging through directories and files using a GUI or even from the command line when I know I could get the same task done in much less time (and more reliably) by writing a little throw-away perl program. In the words of Larry Wall (creator of perl), the three great virtues of a programmer are laziness, impatience, and hubris. I'll take a little shell/perl/script programming any day if it saves me time, and not having the ability to do this is, well, lame.

That said, there are definitely times when a program/problem needs to move to a more robust or expressive language. Scripting it just part of the toolkit.