I sometimes regret I never learned to "really" write shell scripts. I stumbled across Perl early on, and for anything more complex than canned command invocation(s) or a simple loop, I usually go for Perl.

There is something to be said in favor of the shell being always available, but Perl is almost always available. FreeBSD does not have it base of the base system, but OpenBSD does, and most Linux distros do, too.

But it is fun to connect a couple of simple commands via pipes and create something surprisingly complex. I don't do it all the time, but it happens.