Shell Programming and Scripting

Im planning to automate my testcases. Please suggest me a python module that will ease my automation scripting.

General steps involved in the testcase execution: (all steps below are done in linux machine)
1) start the application under test (AUT)
2) connect to oracle/ms sql db and update values.
3) Trigger an scenario from simulator. (simulator is a perl script that sends messages to AUT and expects response)
4) Get pass/fail status from simulator
5) check expected values in DB
6) finally display/log the result

It really depends on what you need to do, but that sounds a lot easier to do in script than python, where you'd need to guide it through every little step like a newborn(open process, write to process, read from process, write to log file, write to logfile, close logfile, wait for process to quit, rinse, repeat...)