Shell scripting provides a certain set of features as compared to what we get in other scripted programming languages such as Python, Ruby, Perl, and AWK. These languages provide additional features as compared to what we get in a shell script language. On Linux and UNIX-based system, to use these languages, we have to install them separately if they are not preinstalled.

Consider a simple example: there is a json or XML file and we want to parse it and retrieve the data stored in it. It's very hard and error-prone to do this using shell and its commands, but if we are aware of the Python or Ruby languages, we can easily do it and then embed it into a shell script. Embedding another language in a shell script should be done to reduce the effort and also to achieve better performance.

The syntax for embedding other languages in a shell script is as follows: