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Maybe it's a bit like current C++ language spec:

There's enough complexity in the language spec that most people stick with a (fairly shared) subset.

Bash can be very powerful, but IMHO there's a certain point where I find it saner to accomplish the same thing via Python.

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man bash. That's the secret. man bash.
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The cool thing about programming languages like Ruby is that they’re very conducive to one-liners. You can use them to generate bash statements that you can then pipe back to bash. `ls | ruby -nle 'puts "mv #{$_} #{$_.gsub(/_/, ".")}"' | bash` is a pattern I use all the time, for example. Easy way of generating complex bash statements without having to bother with the bash man page.
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Do you need to pipe the ruby output to bash? Ruby could just run the mv directly by wrapping in backticks instead of quotes.
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Seems to be the flavour of the day :)
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