Star Why You Should Adopt Python to Manage UNIX Systems
Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Fri 14th Sep 2007 23:08 UTC
General Development As a system administrator, you run across numerous challenges and problems. Managing users, disk space, processes, devices, and backups can cause many system administrators to lose their hair, good humor, or sanity. Shell scripts can help, but they often have frustrating limitations. This is where a full-featured scripting language, such as Python, can turn a tedious task into an easy one. Python is a scripting language that looks like it was made for system administrators.
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rover
Member since:
2005-08-07

there is not one shell, but several and the 'script shells' depends on a bunch of tools, all of which have variants depending on the version, OS, etc.


That was pretty much the motivation for creating Perl back in the 80s. The situation has improved quite a lot since then. The end of the Unix wars brought a good deal of industry consolidation and the standardization of all those tools. Nowadays it's quite feasible to create shell scripts devoid of this kind of problems.

Even the shell is standardized. POSIX 1003.2 made /bin/sh a KornShell lookalike rather than the historical Bourne shell. That's the only shell you should use for scripts.

But the one true reason to prefer shell scripts is that way you can leverage your knowledge of the command line. Conversely, writing shell scripts will improve your skills in all the standard Unix utilities. Once you start using Perl, Python, etc. you'll have to learn two ways of doing the same thing: One way to do it interactively and one to script it.

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