I am pretty new to Scripting Languages, and was trying to learn Bash Shell Scripting for reading and printing PostScript (PS) files from a directory (which may contain 10000's of files) in Linux environment. Basically you can call it as a bulk print processing job. This script will involve filtering of files bases on some criteria involving both floating point numbers and string characters on which search will be done (something like a 'grep' or 'sed' in Shell), and so involves reading files also.

Now, as I have continued learning Bash Shell Scripting, I came to know about python scripts which typically can do anything which a Shell Script can do and becomes much more efficient when (1)not dealing with system admin task (which in this case is true), and (2)when the file becomes large (typically more then 1000 lines, I think I will get around something 500-600 lines when finished)

So here's my Question, Now that I am learning (from scratch), so should I go with Bash Shell Script or Python Shell Script, given the condition that (1)I am not thinking of making my script portable to other platform, (2)I have basic requirement of dealing with ps files (or some other non-system, text files) and (3)I want to buil a really fexible script which can take input much like any of the Linux native system commands (like, cp, ls, dd etc)

I actually might vote for BASH because I think it's closer to the shell and you'll be using a lot of shell commands. But given your comment about floating point, that would be python. Why that requirement though?

personaly i would stick with bash until you hit a point where you need something a little more robust then i would switch. however bash can solve alot and is really quick to implement for an admin

i think bash since this command could probably be the basis of your project:but reading your op i'm not able to ascertain of what other tasks you mite need to take care of.

keep us posted.

These are basically Telephone Bills, which needs to be filtered based on different criteria like amount, address and exchange_code, it requires comparing with floating point and strings.

Also, I too was working with bash initially as it represents virtual shell, but then for this particular task, I don't require Admin task.

And then, the most important thing, is yes my command will basically revolve around this command
lpr *.ps

which though I din't thought initially, but then with bash I am not able to find much help in dealing with *.ps files, and neither bash is an intuitive language