I find that much of the strength of bash/shell comes from the surrounding utilities though. So simply jumping to ruby won't magically let your "shell script" work on both windows and Linux, just because you have ruby installed;there likely not be a similar set of building blocks like "wc" etc. You could of course replicate most via the ruby std lib - and it's arguably easier to write test driven ruby than bash.
http://ibmsystemsmag.com/aix/tipstechniques/systemsmanagemen...
https://redpanthers.co/different-ways-to-run-shell-commands-...
Perl/awk like one-liner/filters in ruby:
http://reference.jumpingmonkey.org/programming_languages/rub...
https://nithinbekal.com/posts/ruby-sed-awk/
Of note is that ruby allows "backtick execution":
filename = 'some_file.txt' wordcount = `wc --words #{filename}`
I find that much of the strength of bash/shell comes from the surrounding utilities though. So simply jumping to ruby won't magically let your "shell script" work on both windows and Linux, just because you have ruby installed;there likely not be a similar set of building blocks like "wc" etc. You could of course replicate most via the ruby std lib - and it's arguably easier to write test driven ruby than bash.