Re: [tlug] What is the most appropriate scripting language

[Walter Hansen <gandalf@example.com>]

Dave M G wrote:
> What would be the appropriate scripting language, and might there be a 
> resource which would help a newbie like me set up the above tasks?
>
> Thank you for any advice.

I'd say shell script would be the simplest although I didn't know an 
easy method for sending mime email existed until this discussion 
started. They're rather like DOS batch files except without all the 
limitations. In reality DOS batch files are a piss poor imitation 
version of shell scripting. There is really not much that can not be 
done there.

However some things are not easy to do there. For those I generally use 
perl or perhaps php, but php is geared toward web stuff and isn't near 
as useful for scripting. Perl in my opinion is the king of the 
administrative task languages. It's also available for Windows.

If you have any programming experience you should be able to pick up 
shell scripting within a day or so and could master it in a couple 
weeks. I never did master it as I don't use it for anything that complex.

Perl is a bit more of a challenge, but it's wonderful how most 
everything just makes sense. Perl is best described as the "swiss army 
chainsaw". You can stick applications and operating systems together 
with perl. You can easily do things that would require hundreds of lines 
of code in other languages in just a few.