I would use perl to publish a portable app. But my apps always are pre-alpha
Sometimes use awk, but can't get rid of exit codes (breaking a line with a success). Mostly use it to re-order(print) data output.
For what the shell can't do, am on sed, trying to get rid of gsed in my code. Still using gtr though.
Found that gdate handles most of my datestrings properly, never read date::manip.
Definitively put bash out of bonds, {pd}ksh is much cleaner and available on other OSes.
Fwiw,
one-liner to get rid of xml/html tabs, deletes anything between < and the next >
(there are many packages in the tree to de-htmlize)