You'd need some libraries before that was comfortable. At the very least you would want to install LFS (Lua File System), for things like checking if files exists and what permissions they have. If Lua string patterns don't cut it for your text munging needs, you would want another library, either a regex library, or, even better LPeg. Even with those things, things like running several commands connected by pipes is not going to be as convenient as in sh or even Perl.