Opinion on best practice...

[Grant Edwards]

On 2013-02-06, Neil Cerutti <neilc at norwich.edu> wrote:
> On 2013-02-05, Grant Edwards <invalid at invalid.invalid> wrote:
>> On 2013-02-05, Neil Cerutti <neilc at norwich.edu> wrote:
>>> On 2013-02-05, Walter Hurry <walterhurry at lavabit.com> wrote:
>>>>> Sorry, I'm a Linux guy.  I have no clue what that means.
>>>>
>>>> Hooray for common sense! Python is great, but it's silly to use
>>>> Python (unless there is good reason) when a simple shell script
>>>> will do the job.
>>>
>>> Python is an excellent option for writing shell scripts,
>>> particularly if your shell is cmd.exe.
>>
>> The OP stated explicitly that the target OS was Linux:
>>
>>>>> I need to pick up a language that would cover the Linux platform.  I
>>>>> use Powershell for a scripting language on the Windows side of
>>>>> things.
>>
>> Don't get me wrong -- I think Python is great -- but when the
>> target OS is Linux, and what you want to do are file find,
>> move, copy, rename, delete operations, then I still say bash
>> should be what you try first.
>
> I had Cygwin on my office computer for many years, and wrote
> shell scripts to do things like reconcile fund lists from
> separate source files, and generate reports of the differences.

Back when the earth was young, I used some pretty extensive Bourne
shell scripts to perform design checks on multi-volume software
requirements specifications that were written in LaTeX -- and that was
on VAX/VMS with DECShell (sort of the VMS equivalent of Cygwin).  It
worked fine but it was excruciatingly slow because of the high fork()
overhead in VMS.

-- 
Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! If Robert Di Niro
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