Change shell functions to python or other scripting language

[mamelara]

Pretty minor all things considered but I wonder why the helper functions are in bash? Python is much more readable and has way more capabilities than bash.

I know it's additional work but could be a worthy investment

[sleak-lbl]

I'm going to push back on this one - they're bash functions because I call them from bash, and they're mostly just stitching together sacct etc calls with command-line options I often use. Moving them to python would mean calling bash from python from bash, and python's "subprocess" support is clumsier than directly using bash