I don't know too much about the history, but wasn't this one of the original motivations for Python? Like it was meant to be basically "bash scripting but with better ergonomics", or something like that.
You might thinking of Perl. Affectionately known as the swiss army chainsaw of programming languages, it incorporated elements from bash, awk, sed, etc and smushed them together into a language that carried the early Web.
Sounds more like Perl.
I do miss Perl. It was far nicer than Python as a bash replacement. Python is better for larger projects in my opinion, as Perl is too flexible and expressive.