How Linux Works

Scripting Languages

A long time ago, the average Unix systems manager didn't have to worry much about scripting languages other than the Bourne shell and awk. Shell scripts (discussed in Chapter 7) continue to be an important part of Unix, but as stated earlier, awk has faded somewhat from the scripting arena. However, many powerful successors have arrived, and many systems programs have actually switched from C to scripting languages (such as the sensible version of the whois program). Let's look at some scripting basics.

The very first thing that you need to know about any scripting language is that the first line of a script looks similar to a Bourne shell script. For example, a Perl script starts out like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

In Unix, any ...