don't listen to the others.

yes. I think if you find yourself dropping to sed/grep/awk/find too much, switch to python.

The language itself imho seems more readable. Strings, lists and hashes seem better especially when you choke on quoting.

And the python standard library makes a huge difference when you grow above "simple". I love argparse for readable arguments with help. os.path lets you manipulate paths and filenames in a readable and robust way. you can read and write json, csv and more. datetime lets you manipulate dates and times.