Perl's big win for one-liners is braces syntax. Interestingly, there are already projects to add braces syntax[1].
Two of the three Perl features are also Python features, namely -m to run a module and -c to run code on the command line.
Regarding Perl being a better shell, there are modules like `doit` and `invoke` that make Python far better than perl for managing jobs, precisely because they make forking off jobs super easy.
But now that you mention it... I want to write a module to make python one-liners easy.
Yeah, perl borrows backticks from bash[3], so it's giving you syntax to do it directly, and it's long had strong support for opening a process using a very intuitive syntax.
Python's subprocess module works quite well, but gets extremely verbose[4] as you try to do anything more complex than "run a command and get the output" and has some nasty gotchas[2].
I forget the invoke syntax, but doit[1] is basically a make replacement so calling the shell is pretty easy:
I'm an experienced Perl user, but I'm not as familiar with Python. In addition, I'm not really using Perl for sysadmin stuff, so I tend to try to keep stuff "within" Perl. As an example, I'd rather use the File::Find module than use backticks to invoke `find`. This has really nothing to do with functionality - I'm almost always on Linux, and the syntaxes are similarly hairy - it's just that usually you get more powerful functionality using the Perl functionality.
Two of the three Perl features are also Python features, namely -m to run a module and -c to run code on the command line.
Regarding Perl being a better shell, there are modules like `doit` and `invoke` that make Python far better than perl for managing jobs, precisely because they make forking off jobs super easy.
But now that you mention it... I want to write a module to make python one-liners easy.
[1]: https://pypi.org/project/brackets/