I might do the same if there isn't anything already pre installed. On most of the RHEL machines I've used there has at least been some Python or Perl interpreter installed. Maybe that was just something the IT folks did.

I'm not really talking about making something longer just to be more clear either. I just meant all the nice libraries and Python data structures seem to allow me to do complex things in a short amount of code. Bash and Awk and all the Linux commands are great for simple things, but I haven't figured out how to handle more complex data outputs.