It has been discussed recently somewhat in The new old..

and Revisiting AWK, but I am finding more and more treatments of Unix shell scripting (actually, not quite "shell scripting", but the combination of all of the Unix mini-languages) as a means to perform complex tasks usually reserved for real monolithic programming languages.

Here is an interesting (intro level) computational linguistics paper (original postscript) (verbatim pdf) about counting trigrams on a decent size corpus using just standard Unix utilities.