grauzone wrote:
Sure, /bin/sh is the least common denominator. But is there a UNIX that can't run python?
Well one good part about these tools is that there's plenty of overlap between them. Like stick-shift cars, you can drive at a given speed in two gears without ruining the engine.
I use zsh for shell scripting and don't find it half bad for what I ask from it. One good thing about shell scripting is that its paradigm is nicely constrained: you operate at file level. In a general language you open file, process file, close file. In a shell your file is a unit, and a program is a unit. Of course you could also do the same in a general language with the right libs, but the playfield is too vast; in a Python or Perl script you could find pretty much any code. But as soon as I open a shell script, I know where to set my level of expectations. Here's where I operate at file and program level, and for the actual programs I use another language. That nicely modularizes and compartmentalizes my work.
Could you have written Steve's script in python? Absolutely. It'd be the same way as driving your car one block to buy a bread - possible, not entirely unreasonable, just a bit inefficacious.
There's been a number of experiments to replace the shell with scheme, perl, or python. I'm not sure how successful they were for particular people, but they didn't quite take. My speculation is that general languages are "too powerful" for shell scripting.
Andrei
