*(though I draw the line at one maintenance script I saw last year. It was
    a Python script where every other line was os.system. It just struck
    me as rather pointless starting a Python interpreter if you're just
    going to use it like a shell script - you might as well do the whole lot in the shell to begin with).*

FWIW, one of my favorite features of Perl syntax is that you can do things like this. A lot of my quick-and-dirty sysadmin scripts end up being Perl scripts with lots of backticks. It's handy for when they grow (as they often do) into more full-featured scripts.