Those who know me are aware that I am a recovering shell programmer.Β I have 35+ years of various shell scripts involving complicated code pipelines with grep, cut, sort, uniq, awk, input files, output files, redirects, pipes etc...cobbled together to get jobs done. None of it is elegant and little of it could be called pretty. The last couple of years I have been trying to ramp up on Python and am increasingly finding that these complicated shell code scripts can be elegantly implemented in Python. The resulting code is way easier to read and way more supportable.