I said Python wasn't going to be more concise. I said it has a variety of other useful properties. For instance, at least as I write this, you have "cut -d’-‘"; I assume you meant apostrophes (something getting too polite in a c&p, I assume) but the apostrophes are unnecessary, but you're so used to the compromises in shell I talked about you probably put those in there automatically. I'm not criticizing that; it's a reasonable accommodation to shell's quirks. But it is a quirk.

Your code also breaks if the filenames have spaces:

    $ ls -1                                                                      
    bar-def-gh i-jkl-mno-p                                                                         
    bar-def-ghi-jkl-mno-p                                                                          
    $ for i in `ls`; do echo $i | grep bar | cut -d- -f3,4; done
    gh
    ghi-jkl

The natural Python code you'd write to replace it will do what you expect and print the file with a space in it in the way you'd expect. You can fix this in bash via "for i in [asterisk]" (or, in this case, "for i in [asterisk]bar[asterisk]"), but, well, remember when I said bash requires you to understand the half-a-dozen ways strings and filenames interact...? In Python, there's just the one way that strings work.

(HN is forcing me to say [asterisk]. AFAIK there's still no escaping for them.)

You lucked out a bit here too; I don't think I can get echo to do anything very interesting based on file names. Had you interpolated that somewhere more interesting I'd give you some security issues too, if anybody not trusted can create files, which, again, the naive Python code would be much more robust to, because in Python, you have to explicitly ask to bring a string up to an execution context or a function parameter context, unlike shell's complicated rules for interleaving them. You pay a steep price for the convenience.

Of course, this is a matter of scale. I use that sort of pipeline interactively every day. I just start shuddering when it goes in a file for a script, and shudder more if it goes into source control.