The things I have to deal with at work
Mostly I'm just writing this out for my own benefit, so I can see its awfulness with my own eyes.

In order to run the main hybrid test program I use here at work, I
1) run a Perl script, which nicely generates the arguments and passes them to...
2) a shell script, whose main purpose is to call...
3) another shell script (written in tcsh), which checks that everything is in order and then calls...
4) a C program with an embedded Tcl interpreter, whose first action is to call...
5) a Tcl script, which again checks that everything is in order and then calls....
6) a C routine within (4) to run the main testing program.

Just to confuse things more, (2) and (5) are actually the same file, with some cleverly-written half-commented shell at the beginning so that it'll go to (3) when called as a shell script and (6) when invoked as a Tcl script.

Needless to say, if I had my druthers, I'd rip out 90% of this labyrinth. Sadly, I don't...at least for now.