Chapter 8
Automating Administrative Tasks
One of the greatest strengths of OS X is the abundance of scripting languages supported out of the box. Many of these languages are interpreted by a host program rather than run directly as lower-level machine code, and thus they are text files with human-readable syntax. Because such languages are translated into machine code at run time, interpreted programs are sometimes much slower than their compiled equivalents. However, because you can edit these programs and then run them immediately, they are common tools used by system administrators to automate tasks.
Some interpreters are specifically made to run code such as Python, Perl, or Ruby, while others are more interactive and are meant for day-to-day ...
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