Indeed Raku is a delight to use for 'shell scripting'.

Perl was originally written as an amalgamation of grep,sed,tr, awk and I am sure a few more unix utilities with their own mini languages. The idea was to use one language instead of tying together half a dozen mini-languages in a shell script. And it worked really well. Perl being a demon with text munging didn't hurt.

Raku keeps this heritage but adds so much more (for better or worse :-) ). It inherits ideas from Lisp and functional programming languages. The thing that impressed me was, how easy it was to use concurrency.