Ah, good old scripting. The way to quickly automate those obnoxious, drawn out tasks. That is what bash (or zsh, ksh, csh, etc. ad infinitum) is for, it is what Python is for, it is what Ruby is for, it is what Perl is for. At my current job, I get a lot of those little tasks that need to get done, but would be tedious (not to mention very, very long) to do by hand, but are superbly suited for scripting. Fifteen or twenty minutes spent writing the script and I can do other things while the input is getting crunched. I've had times were the script took about fifteen or twenty minutes to write, but I had enough input that it took hours to finish crunching.
Yet I continue to be amazed at the number of people who will simply rush in and do the task at hand, spending many tedious hours doing little details without even stopping to wonder if there is a better way. I admit it: I would go insane doing the same thing. These are the unusers.
Then there are people on the other end. There are the people who want to write a 3D engine in Perl or a massive enterprise application in Python.
These are the abusers. Any and every conceivable task must be done in scripting language XYZ. Heck, there are even wiki engines written in bash. While the line between applications development and scripting has been somewhat blurred, there are still things that it is just not a good idea to script. Anything where performance is key would be a place where you do not want to script or anything that is going to be expected to scale way up.
The proper use of scripting, in my every so humble opinion, is the automating of tasks, usually through the gluing together of other components. Personally, I use bash for most of this type of work and, when bash can't do it, Python. For actual development, I usually use C#, Haskell, or Scheme, with a smattering of C/C++. I don't use Perl at all if I can avoid it. Not to upset anyone or anything, but Perl looks like line noise. It is just way too kludgy a way to do things for my taste.
Where do the culprits come in? The unusers tend to be in corposphere where the vast majority of the people who get these little tasks don't know anything about programming and hence don't even know that there is a better way. The abusers tend to be the h4x0r types. No sense of larger aesthetic, just quick and dirty get the job done. Sadly, there aren't too many users out there. Many IT staffs are shackled from doing this sort of thing and most of the admins couldn't do it anyway. The places where it tends to get done right, I think, are in individuals' homes where they have free creative lease, acadamia (I had a professor who more or less graded work on scripted unit testing), and *NIX shops.