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miah mutters: | http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/ | Advanced Bash Scripting Guide | | GNU AWK users guide | http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html | | Agreed though that you can tie yourself in knots with bash(or sh).. Though its often handy for little things. As well, you'll never see initscripts written in Perl or Python, or atleast you shouldnt =) Why not? If you can rely on your customers' systems having perl or python (perhaps because they came with the CD that you had them install), then there's no reason not to use them. A couple years ago, a friend who worked at a software firm (which one isn't really relevant) told about this happening there. The software guys decided to quietly include perl in their distribution. The only thing the installer did was check for perl, and if not, install it. Then it exec'd the real install script, which was written in perl. He said that you could practically hear the sighs of relief as one engineer after another realized that they'd never have to write another shell script. He also said that after a while, they added code to the the installer to do the same installation of tcl and python. This produced a bit more debate, but it meant that they could pick up tools in those popular languages and include them easily. And soon after that, all the programmers were finding excuses to use all three languages, so they could get them on their resumes. Eventually the debate settled down on the relative merits and demerits of each language. The general concensus was that, since none was best at everything, the right approach was to continue to use all three. And I'd bet that by now, php is also on the list. The unix "Bourne" shell was originally intended as a rather simple tool for packaging frequently-used sets of commands. It wasn't intended as a real programming language. It was also a demo that a command language didn't have to be hard-wired into the OS, and this was a radical idea in the early 70's. The idea was that, by moving all user interaction out into an executable program, people would be encouraged to experiment and come up with good languages. There was no reason at all to have just one, of course, and with time we would expect a number of different command and scripting language to develop, for different classes of users and tasks. This is pretty much what has happened.
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