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(5) Other scripting languages

Other Scripting Languages

There are many other programs which read a file of commands and carry out a sequence of actions. The "#!/path/to/program" convention allows any of them to be used as a scripting language to create new commands. Some are highly specialized, and some are much more efficient than the equivalent shell scripts at certain tasks. There is never only one way to perform a function, and often the choice comes down to factors like:

what is installed already - many other scripting languages are not available by default
what similar code already exists
what you are most familiar with and can use most efficiently. Your time is usually more expensive than computer cycles.

Some major players (all of these are freely available) in the general purpose scripting languages are:

awk
A pattern matching and data (text and numeric) manipulation tool. Predates perl. Installed on all Unix systems. Often used in combination with shell scripts.
perl
The most used scripting language for Web CGI applications and system administration tasks. Perl is harder to learn, and is not installed by default on all systems (but most modern systems have it now). It is more efficient and has an enormous library of functions available. You could use Perl for almost all scripting tasks, but the syntax is very different to the shell command line
python
An object-oriented scripting language. Not widely installed.
tcl/tk
Tool Command Language. Another general purpose scripting language. The "tk" component is a scripted interface to standard X-windows graphical components, so the combination is often used to create graphical user interfaces.
Ksh93 can be extended by linking to shared libraries providing additional internal commands. One example of an extended shell is tksh which incorporates Tcl/Tk with ksh and allows generation of scripts using both languages. It can be used for prototyping GUI applications.

scripting-languages.src last modified Feb 10, 2005

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