Python or perl scripts are fine if you are doing more complex and "algorithmic" stuff, but for automating system administration tasks, I often find that shell scripts are simpler and more concise.
But shell scripting isn't just "scripting" (as in ".sh" files with commands). A proficient unix user/sysadmin will often build one-shot commands using features other people thing are only useful in batch scripts. Actually this is something I find baffles both the Windows-types and the people that solve every problem with "perl -e".
You're right about people needing to understand bash and Unix commands - I've seen two 20+ line Perl scripts that run the equivalent of 'date -I' and 'nc' respectively.
That said, I believe bash is somewhat limited for system administration - which I know is very odd amongst system administrators - but please let me explain why.
Using the shell on a Linux based OS in 2009, you miss out on:
* filesystem events (inotify)
* hardware events (dbus)
* config for programs with tree structured configuration (lxml)
* config for programs with sqlite based configuration
* RPM / yum beyond what their command line apps expose (and perhaps dpkg/apt too, but I need to investigate this further).
...as the commands / shell function libraries to handle these are often immature compared to the equivalent APIs. As a result, you get sysadmins causing unnecessary load by polling a file repeatedly at intervals (eg, via a cron job) rather than letting the kernel tell them when their file has changed.
I'm hopefully giving a talk about using richer languages for system administration at PyCon 2010 - I'd love to hear any thoughts or opinions on these matters fron HN readers.
Python or perl scripts are fine if you are doing more complex and "algorithmic" stuff, but for automating system administration tasks, I often find that shell scripts are simpler and more concise.
But shell scripting isn't just "scripting" (as in ".sh" files with commands). A proficient unix user/sysadmin will often build one-shot commands using features other people thing are only useful in batch scripts. Actually this is something I find baffles both the Windows-types and the people that solve every problem with "perl -e".