On Aug 19, 2007, at 2:40 PM, Steve Lamb wrote:
Besides, until operating systems start having init scripts written
in Perl or Python, being able to write shell scripts is going to
be an essential system administration skill. ;)
Quite frankly they should now. Any time I've had to throw
something into init scripts I've done it in Python. The last
example was a script to determine whether my laptop was running
Debian under VMWare or natively and if natively which dock it was
plugged into. That was 7 years ago. :)
I suspect they don't for two reasons -- one is that if you use bash,
the system can boot without /usr, whereas if you use Python, /usr
becomes critical to getting the system up. (Either that, or you'd
have to move all the modules and libraries that Python depends on
onto the root filesystem. Bash has relatively few dependencies.)
The other is that the load time for bash is shorter. Everyone
complains that their system boots too slowly as it is. ;)
There are also maintenance issues with incorporating a complex
language that's under active development as a critical part of an
operating system. FreeBSD dropped Perl from their base system
because "base Perl" became such a pain to maintain. They were
essentially put in the position of having to fork Perl to maintain
any sort of stable target, and that was more work than they wanted to
take on.
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