Comments on: When to use shell scripts

By: Khurt L Williams

Khurt L Williams — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 16:27:42 +0000

I generally do not write much shell scripts these days. During the 10 years that I have been using Perl I have found it very useful for almost all of the command line work I need to do. I still write shell scripts when I need to do something that will take a long time but require relatively few commands. e.g Decompressing a bunch of very large logs files that are individual piped to a perl script for processing for say end of year reporting.

By: Jon Emmons

Jon Emmons — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 02:35:23 +0000

A good point Al. Spending 15 minutes to write a script that will save you hours of work is definitely worth it, but often, especially for scripting novices, it may be easier to just perform the task manually.

I’d still stand by this generalization, but yes, there are countless examples where a one-time script can save you time, mistakes and frustration.

By: al

al — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 01:28:34 +0000

“In general there is little point in writing a shell script to do something once. ”

I’d have to disagree on this … quite often you may find yourself needing to do something only once, or once in a very great while, but a script is justified when it saves time. The time of a sysadmin or a dba is very valuable, even if you only save 10 minutes by writing a script, that’s still worth it in most cases. Scripts are also very good at repetitive tasks, something humans aren’t very good at, and are likely to screw up; the script on the other hand is much less likely to make a mistake.