I've noticed a certain amount of bashing of shells on this list, and I'm wondering.
Am I unique in thinking that shells are very good for some things but are not that great as programming languages... I know that for me if a shell script grows longer than a couple of lines or gets to involve anything much more complex than a grep I start looking at it in terms of "how could I do this in Python". True, if I were looking at widely distributing a piece of software and it needed a startup script I would go through the hurt of /bin/sh and figuring out the old-school way of doing things. but in my day to day life the shell is an interface, not a programming language... and while it's necessary for it to be a programming language it's optimized to be an interface. http://www.efn.org/~laprice ( Community, Cooperation, Consensus http://www.opn.org ( Openness to serendipity, make mistakes http://www.efn.org/~laprice/poems ( but learn from them.(carpe fructus ludi) http://allie.office.efn.org/phpwiki/index.php?OregonPublicNetworking
