no habla bash muy bien...

[John Chambers]

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.