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Comment by TillE | Hacker News Reader

Perl is probably still the best in its class of being a decent language while allowing close interaction with shell commands. If I really needed to write a sophisticated shell script (try to avoid that), I'd probably go for Perl.

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I'm mostly in agreement about Perl's status, but I'd rather take the small hit in verbosity for the niceness of the rest of Python rather than having to deal with Perl... Yeah it kind of sucks not having the backtick operator, but at least it's not too much of a hassle to do something like:

    from subprocess import check_output as sh
    files = sh(['ls'])
    print files

This has its limits but covers a lot of basic use-cases for the backtick. I think some people first see an alternate way of doing this in Python that's a lot more hairy, even if more flexible, but it doesn't have to be that way...

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