Emperor Sh and the Traveller
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A young traveller came to visit Emperor Sh, and found him sitting in his
sparsely furnished temple.

“Emperor Sh,” he said, “I am told you are the greatest scholar of shell that
the world has known.”

Emperor Sh made no reply.  The traveller continued.

“I have come to ask your advice.  I am thinking of developing a character-based
graphing tool.  It will interactively change the plot based on key presses.
Which shell commands should I use?”

“Don’t do it in shell,” said Emperor Sh, curtly.

The young traveller was confused.  He tried again.  “Well… I am also working on
a database audit script.  It needs to verify that certain characters do not
appear in any fields in several tables.  What should—”

“Don’t do it in shell,” interrupted Emperor Sh.

The traveller began to despair.  “I have journeyed one thousand miles, tried
thirteen distributions of my operating system, and waded through hundreds of
badly-written manual pages,” he cried, “and now I have finally come to Emperor
Sh, the greatest shell programmer in the world, and I am told to use no shell
at all!  Perhaps I should do what my Python user friends told me to do, and
just pipe together some scripts in venv environments!”

“Good idea,” said Emperor Sh.  “Do it in shell.”

Enlightenment crushed down on the young traveller and he bowed to the Emperor,
sobbing with reverent joy.