It'd be interesting to know which scripting languages contributors to this site use.
Please add a comment below indicating what you have scripted, what language you used and why. If there's a problem with confidentiality, please feel free to contribute anonymously or be vague about your application.
Perl:
ftp download of log files (and insertion into an rdbms)
building a static website from a source tree based on a few mapping rules
Both done in perl - inbuilt regex handling helped, as did the CPAN. These days I'd use python because the messiness of perl has got to me. I'm slowly converting my scripts to python. Apart from hygine reasons, I'm keen on this because I can embed Python in java apps.
I started using perl in 1994, because I thought that a mishmash of little awk and csh scripts was becoming unmaintainable, so I was in the market for "a scripting language that runs on Unix, Linux and DOS, that does text manipulation well". I've got a little library of scripts for doing small tasks. I started playing with Python last year (2001), but I don't feel confident enough to call myself a python programmer yet.
Scan through a whole bunch of html files, doing multiline regular expression search-n-replace. I started off trying it in Perl, but got frustrated with the syntax.
CGI scripts to record and present usage metrics on tools like JUnit (they're hacked to report each use to Apache)
scripts wrapping Perforce, to 1) make it behave more like cvs, 2) enforce company naming conventions for folders in the repository, branches, views etc.
We use Perl as our main scripting language because all our development machines have it installed as part of the Symbian OS SDKs, and in order to support those SDKs those machines all Wintel. For related reasons we do a little bit of DOS (NT flavour) batch file stuff. -- KeithBBash
Sometimes when you need to get something done really quickly, bash is your friend. I've also sort of done one or two things test first in bash (modified ksh unit) but need to fix some of the bugs before releasing - so that'll be never.
find, sort, uniq, grep, sed, awk, netcat, openssl, there is a really set of utilities portable on Posix.1 and fun. Of course the Gnu tools are richer than some of the others.
Perl and Python
Higher level scripting I vary between the two, depending on what I'm doing and who has to maintain it. Used for stuff like mime handling, general data munging (log analysis), etc.
I like some of Perl Larry Wall's quotes. Always more than one way to do it.
Great support libraries accross multiple platforms.
Could we please quickly aggree a convention as to whether contrbution to this page are going to be grouped by contributor first, or language first? Thanks.
Python I'm a big fan of this and use it quite a lot, very good to generating SQL and parsing log files etc. Starting to get my head around the Gtk bindings.
I do have my doubt's about using it for large amounts of coding. I think this is a problem with scripting in general, I like a compilation hoop to jump through.
We also use Jython which allows us to include Python code into our Java platform. It's very cool to be able to change code at runtime within the framework of a Java app.
Bash, there's know way I could live with DOS batch files after this. Though I do confuse $$'', ''$?'' and ''$!
$$ current process id
$! last process id
$? last return code
-- JeffMartinPython Used it a lot for automated coding standards checks and other tools for extracting meta information from java and jhtml pages.
Bash Used for short tasks: if it is longer than a line I write it in python (tho' constructing bizarre one liners can be fun), mostly use bash under cygwin. -- ChrisCottee
ScriptingLanguageSurvey