On 2007-08-07 12:39:37 -0700, David Brodbeck wrote: > On Aug 7, 2007, at 11:42 AM, Manon Metten wrote: >> I'm about to learn bash or python scripting.
Why not zsh (more powerful than bash) or perl? >> Or should I learn bash scripting anyway? > > If you plan to do much system administration, learning bash scripting is > worthwhile. There are three reasons I can think of right off the bat: > - Every Unix-like system you encounter will have some version of the Bourne > shell. Not every system will have Python. Not every system has bash. If this is for compatibility, you can learn POSIX sh, but e.g. Solaris /bin/sh is not a POSIX sh. For this reason and because POSIX sh is limited (you can't execute a command and have a timeout on it), I now write all my portable scripts in Perl since it is on every system I've met. > - You will often need to modify or maintain other people's bash scripts, > since that's how most startup scripts and the like are written. > - Simple bash scripts can be done right from the shell prompt, which is > sometimes handy. > Stuff like 'for FILE in `ls *.wav` ; do lame -h -b 160 $FILE $FILE.mp3 ; > done' to encode a bunch of WAV files to MP3, to give a crude example. This one is bad. Really. for FILE in *.wav; do lame -h -b 160 "$FILE" "$FILE.mp3"; done This is another reason why sh sucks. It's too easy to write broken things. -- Vincent Lefèvre <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.org/> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.org/blog/> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Arenaire project (LIP, ENS-Lyon) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
