Question concerning scripting language preference.
 

Hello All!

Just wanted to take a quick survey of the scripting, or programming languages that are most often used for day to day administration of linux systems? Shell scripting is the obvious one. But I was curious what other languages the linux admin community here finds useful? Perl? Ruby? C?

I'm starting down the path of more formal system administration duties and am looking at developing custom tools for the tasks ahead of me.

Thanks!

K

im not a linux admin but i find python is useful to use on linux

I use Perl routinely. If I was looking for a language to do the same/similar things today, I would choose Python. C is rarely useful for system admin tasks.
--- rod.

Bourne shell and Perl solve 95% of my technical problems. (It gets complicated for the remaining 5%. For webapps I use PHP. For rare, specific utilities, I use C. When absolutely necessary - usually to play nice with someone else's APIs - I use Python and Java. I have found nice uses for Expect/TCL here and there.)

ditto
 

Bash (occasionally KORN-ksh on AIX, True64Unix, SOLARIS, and HP-UX) is my daily tool for most SA functions.

Where it is appropriate, PERL is my goto tool: for jobs that do not require calling external utilities.

C and Pascal serve for when I need to create a new utility, but that need is getting quite rare as the GNU and associate toolsets have become VERY complete and powerful.

I have stopped using FORTRAN, COBOL, zsh, Modula-II, BASIC, Pilot, and FORTH: as they are no longer properly supported on most modern systems. I have not touched a decent assembler in years, and miss them terribly, but I have not the personal time or business case to maintain those skills.

I have examined python, php, ruby, and smalltalk (which impressed me), and lisp (probably a few others I have forgotten) and java, but found none that provided more value ( related to my work) that my current tools.

If we get any SA that is doing web development, I suspect your answer set will be significantly different than the answers from those who no longer do (or never have done) web development. There are different tools that have power in that space.

I use bash and awk daily. In my estimation every Linux admin should be competent with at least bash, sed, and awk. Beyond those, look to perl, python, and C.

:twocents:

I would think basic shell script knowledge would be ok for admin, I mean in reality the admin doesn't do a lot of programming tasks, he uses admin tools