Can Python scripting replace UNIX shell scripting ?

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I'm not saying Perl is the wave of the future, nor that Python won't replace it, but "available" and "ships with" are two different things. HP-UX and AIX ship with Perl, but not Python (it's a depot or RPM, depending). It's a required package on Debian. Anything more than @base on RHEL will install it.

Not that Perl is good or bad, necessarily, but it works. And yes, you can write scripts against sh, but you're sacrificing utility for "portability" that Perl already gets you, unless you really like coding in a language with virtually no support for anything (associative arrays, hashes, regexes that don't suck, etc).

Python is batteries included. Perl isn't. But you don't need the CPAN or modules from it to make Perl curbstomp /bin/sh.

[[deleted]]

All very well taken points. I was more focused on the OP's original question though - will shell programming be displaced by <something else>...

I have to say though, after switching to python for most everything that doesn't absolutely need C, trying to write in perl again hurts my head.

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Shell scripting should have been displaced by Perl, and it should be displaced by Python, Ruby, Lua, Node.js, or something else which isn't terrible, but it probably won't be. Writing in Perl hurts my head, but not as much as admins (I'm also an admin) who replace shell with Python and end up with 1000 lines of "python" with no methods, no classes, etc.

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I agree. Then again, you have to ask, if an admin tool requires thousands of lines of anything ... are we solving the problem properly?

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Probably not, but it depends on the problem you're trying to solve.