My experience with bash: Once you do something a bit more complex where bashisms would be handy any shell is so slow and complicated to use that you're better of with Python, even if all your system provides is Python 2.4. And Python is pre-installed under every (non-embedded) Linux distribution I've seen and also on Mac OS X.
Python is more powerful than shells but at the same time has a much simpler syntax (much less to remember). The only thing I miss in Python sometimes is how easy you can do complex piping in shells. It's possible in Python but not at all as handy as in (ba)sh.
Python is more powerful than shells but at the same time has a much simpler syntax (much less to remember). The only thing I miss in Python sometimes is how easy you can do complex piping in shells. It's possible in Python but not at all as handy as in (ba)sh.