title: What among Bash/Python/Perl/Ruby/Sed/Awk for System administration , coding accessories
body: <p><strong><em>I know the question is very subjective. But I cannot form the question in a much more better manner. I would appreciate some guidance.</em></strong></p>
  
  <p>I often as a developer feel how easier it would have been for me if I could have some tools for doing some reasonably complex task on a log file , or a set of source files, or some data set etc.</p>
  
  <p>Clearly, when the same type of task needs to be done repetitively and when speed is critical, I can think of writing it in C++/Java. </p>
  
  <p>But most of the times, it is some kind of text processing or file searching activity that I want to do only once just to perform a quick check or to do some preliminary analysis etc. In such cases, I would be better off doing the task manually rather than writing in C++/Java. But I could surely doing it in seconds if I knew some language like Bash/Python/Perl/Ruby/Sed/Awk.</p>
  
  <p>I know this whole question is subjective and there is no objective definite answer, but in general what does the developer community feel as a whole? What subset of these languages should I know so that I can do all these kinds of tasks easily and improve my productivity.</p>
  
  <p><strong><em>Would Perl be a good choice?</em></strong><br>
  It is a super set of Sed/Awk, plus it allows to write terse code. I can get done with fewer lines of code. It is neither readable nor easily maintainable, but I never wanted those features anyway.
  The only thing that bothers me is the negative publiciity that Perl has got lately and it has been criticized by the Ruby/Python community a lot. Also, I am not sure if it can replace bash scripting totally. 
  If not, then is Perl+Bash a good combination for these kind of tasks?</p>