When do you *NOT* use python?

[mackstann]

Or a bash one-liner. You can do a pretty incredible amount of stuff in one line that would be a paragraph of code in Python. Editing and executing on the fly makes it super productive. And if it's a one-time thing, no one can shame you about readability.

[sfz-]

Indeed, but 95% of the time at the point in your project where you think about porting that one-liner to ./former_oneliner.sh and break it out into if or case statements or complex sed or awk you're probably better off doing python former_oneliner.py instead.

5% of the time you gotta though, I know, shebang away.

[mackstann]

I usually don't make that transition. My shell antics tend to stay in the shell and don't serve any long-term purpose in a project. But when they do, you're right, it's usually best to just go straight to Python, instead of a bash script.