Well, I do have another question now that you bring up BASH. If I want to ensure that I never encounter any shell code that I cannot work with, would you recommend learning the original Bourne shell (Sh) as well as Bash and Ksh or could I realistically get by on just BASH. What If I have to admin a BSD system?
As far as the scripting languages which would you recommend? I know that Perl comes on all Unix like systems out of the box so that seems like a good choice but I don't want a language that limits me to text parsing.
I think you could get away with bash scripts. If I were to administer a BSD system I'd just install bash