I’ve been looking around for a scripting language that:
- has a cli interpreter
- is a “general purpose” language (yes, awk is touring complete but no way I’m using that except for manipulating text)
- allows to write in a functional style (ie. it has functions like map, fold, etc and allows to pass functions around as arguments)
- has a small disk footprint
- has decent documentation (doesn’t need to be great: I can figure out most things, but I don’t want to have to look at the interpter source code to do so)
- has a simple/straightforward setup (ideally, it should be a single executable that I can just copy to a remote system, use to run a script and then delete)
Do you know of something that would fit the bill?
Here’s a use case (the one I run into today, but this is a recurring thing for me).
For my homelab I need (well, want) to generate a luhn mod n check digit (it’s for my provisioning scripts to generate synchting device ids from their certificates).
I couldn’t find ready-made utilities for this and I might actually need might a variation of the “official” algorithm (IIUC syncthing had a bug in their initial implementation and decided to run with it).
I don’t have python (or even bash) available in all my systems, and so my goto language for script is usually sh (yes, posix sh), which in all honestly is quite frustrating for manipulating data.
Oh dude, you are so wrong!
Powershell is available for linux and will run the same modules that have made it such a success on Windows. Want to fire up vmware containers or get a list of vms? Want to talk to Exchange servers? Azure? AWX? $large-corporate-thing? Powershell is a very good tool for that, even if it smells very Microsofty.
The linux version works well - it has some quirks (excessive logging, a MS repo that needs manual approving that breaks automatic updates) but aside from those, it just works. I have several multi-year scripts that tick away nicely in the background.
The key features are missing. Powershell is great for active directory and LDAP. You don’t get that on Linux. It is just is a pain. Power shell is normally a pain but using on Linux is worse.
Can’t say I’ve noticed much pain beyond what I mention - powershell just works.
Powershell evolved well beyond AD and LDAP a long time ago. Objects on the pipeline are a game changer.