> > I'm glad to see that MS will FINALLY build a real command shell into > some future version of the OS. It's really sad that it's going to take > 3-5 years, though. I spend my time about half and half between > administering Windows servers and Linux servers, and I do a lot of > automation tasks on both platforms. The lack of a clean, integrated, > documented Windows shell definitely slows down what would be quick and > simple tasks on a Linux system. >
To seriously shift gears here, merlyn (Randall Schwartz, of O'Reilly Perl books fame) wrote a column once about being quite surprised to find that his *nix admin Perl scripts ran with few modifications on a windows box he found himself having to work on. From what I understand, each Perl port takes the target OS quirks into account, which is where the compatibility niceness comes in. Perl might be an answer for you, though I can't speak from experience, as I'm still trying to wean myself away from PHP. -- Joey Kelly < Minister of the Gospel | Linux Consultant > http://joeykelly.net "I may have invented it, but Bill made it famous." --- David Bradley, the IBM employee that invented CTRL-ALT-DEL -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: not available Url : /pipermail/general_brlug.net/attachments/20050609/1c8bb1bc/attachment.bin From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thu Jun 9 12:58:03 2005 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Tim Fournet) Date: Thu Jun 9 13:00:46 2005 Subject: [brlug-general] Best Slashdot Post Ever In-Reply-To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> References: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> I do/have used perl to script Windows administration functions, and it does work very well. I've even created a few web pages for helpdesk folks to use to look up a user's information, reset their passwords, etc. The WMI functions of perl do work pretty well, but there's always the added tedium of actually having to install perl on the target system. If you're managing just a few systems, it's not bad at all, but there are cases when it would be nice to know that you can accomplish what you want without having to install 3rd party software. I've recently started playing with javascript, which is natively supported in Windows XP and later service packs of Windows 2000. I recently found wpkg ( http://wkpg.sourceforge.net ). A really great tool for automating the installation of software on Windows clients. It works much better than native Group Policy software installations, and is much cheaper (free, of course ;) than SMS or other windows package management software. It's just a simple javascript program that you get the computers to run during startup and it uses xml files to keep track of what to install where. I highly recommend it for whoever needs to unattended-ly install software on windows PCs. On Thu, 2005-06-09 at 11:31 -0500, Joey Kelly wrote: > > > > I'm glad to see that MS will FINALLY build a real command shell into > > some future version of the OS. It's really sad that it's going to take > > 3-5 years, though. I spend my time about half and half between > > administering Windows servers and Linux servers, and I do a lot of > > automation tasks on both platforms. The lack of a clean, integrated, > > documented Windows shell definitely slows down what would be quick and > > simple tasks on a Linux system. > > > > To seriously shift gears here, merlyn (Randall Schwartz, of O'Reilly Perl > books fame) wrote a column once about being quite surprised to find that his > *nix admin Perl scripts ran with few modifications on a windows box he found > himself having to work on. From what I understand, each Perl port takes the > target OS quirks into account, which is where the compatibility niceness > comes in. > > Perl might be an answer for you, though I can't speak from experience, as I'm > still trying to wean myself away from PHP. > > _______________________________________________ > General mailing list > General@brlug.net > http://brlug.net/mailman/listinfo/general_brlug.net
