It sounds like we do very similar jobs and feel the same way about Python. I'm 97% sure you're going to stick with your own language, but for others seriously give Ruby a look.

I absolutely adore Ruby as a scripting language. It's so easy and elegant to shell out to bash and do something with the output. When brevity or familiarity with bash is desired, variables like $? are there also (although there are generally less esoteric ways to do things). Running a simple shell command in Ruby is as easy as using backticks and having the output from the command returned to you as a String (and I always add a .chomp to strip the trailing \n)[1] Example: datestr = `date '+%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S'`.chomp

Worth noting too is that Ruby also has a fantastic one-liner command line syntax like perl and awk for example. Check out https://robm.me.uk/2013/11/ruby-enp/ and https://benoithamelin.tumblr.com/ruby1line/

Also the community is amazing. There are gems for almost everything, and really neat/fun projects like Ruby Warrior: https://github.com/ryanb/ruby-warrior

I'll stop now, but suffice it to say Ruby is one of the best tool sin my belt, and I haven't even mentioned the number of times I've thrown down a simple single-file HTTP service based on Sinatra in record time ;-)

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/2400/2062384