scripting languages

[Jacob Albretsen]

Quoting Michael Torrie <torriem at gmail.com>:

> On 11/08/2010 09:23 AM, Victor Villa wrote:
>> I recently shifted career focus from web dev to sys admin.
>>
>> As I learn Bash i'm finding more and more that knowledge of a scripting
>> language is needed, though i'm seeing some talk about PERL and some talk
>> Python.
>>
>> If my work environment really hasn't taken advantage of a scripting language
>> (nothing predefined), which should I choose?  PERL or Python?
>
> You will likely need to read and maintain both languages.  A lot of
> scripts out there are in Perl that you'll likely need to use and
> possibly modify and update.  On the other hand, a lot of new scripting
> is being done in Python.  So whichever one you choose to write your own
> scripts in, you will probably have to deal with others' scripts written
> in both languages.

Seconded.  It's good to know bash, perl, and python.  Sometimes one  
will be a better to for the job than another.

I once had to script something that would run based on the sunrise and  
sunset times of where the machine was located.  Since we live on a  
spherical planet that is tilted 23 1/2 degrees, sunrise and sunset  
times don't stay the same.  Of course since I knew math and astronomy,  
I was given the task to figure it out since the previous solution of  
just periodically modifying a cron job was not going to cut it in the  
long run.  Rather than write some serious calculations in bash, I  
poked around for perl modules and found someone had already done that  
hard part for me.

http://search.cpan.org/~rkhill/Astro-Sunrise-0.91/Sunrise.pm

And behold, my first ever perl script came to life and the customer  
was very happy.