Re: And they said I was crazy
ksh and posix sh are very good, very lightweight and, so far, very solid. Most people miss the more interesting but still straightforward features such as arrays. Combined with awk(1) or, better, nawk(1) the world is your oyster. Of course Python or similar is better for longer term, more maintainable and larger tasks, short of a compiled language. In fact, a good Python implementation can be faster and better (I believe Sun had problems for a long time because Python was faster and more secure than Java during the early iterations).
A big advantage of Bourne/posix/korn shells is that even the oldest scripts should work and all "system" shell scripts should restrict themselves to Bourne (I remember a curious login bug for a user caused by a Sun system utility written in csh - convert ot sh, bug gone).
I'm sure powershell is wonderful. I even got a version that works on os x. But really, even on windows there are good versions of python, perl and ksh available. Why choose a scripting language with negligible portability or where the chance of it being installed on a non-Windows (or even most Windows) systems is slight. The only good reason is that, like visual basic I suppose, good interaction with other Windows programmes is built in. That, of course, is a very good reason for system administrators.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
