If shell script were a foreign country...

It'd be a vast market, from one side to the other, where dozens of pidgins are spoken (awk, sed, make, regexp, etc), but all somehow come together to get anyone exactly what they want with no muss, no fuss.

Would I want to live there? Only when I'm feeling especially weird. But thank goodness it exists! And how amazing that we pop out to this market, which is such a foreign place, between all our countries, with hardly a thought.

(The real world needs a shell.)