Would Python make a good substitute for the Windows command-line/batch scripts?

Question

I\'ve got some experience with Bash, which I don\'t mind, but now that I\'m doing a lot of Windows development I\'m needing to do basic stuff/write basic scripts using the Wind

Answer 1

Summary

Windows: no need to think, use Python. Unix: quick or run-it-once scripts are for Bash, serious and/or long life time scripts are for Python.

The big talk

In a Windows environment, Python is definitely the best choice since cmd is crappy and PowerShell has not really settled yet. What's more Python can run on several platform so it's a better investment. Finally, Python has a huge set of library so you will almost never hit the "god-I-can't-do-that" wall. This is not true for cmd and PowerShell.

In a Linux environment, this is a bit different. A lot of one liners are shorter, faster, more efficient and often more readable in pure Bash. But if you know your quick and dirty script is going to stay around for a while or will need to be improved, go for Python since it's far easier to maintain and extend and you will be able to do most of the task you can do with GNU tools with the standard library. And if you can't, you can still call the command-line from a Python script.

And of course you can call Python from the shell using -c option:

python -c  "for line in open('/etc/fstab') : print line"

Some more literature about Python used for system administration tasks:

• The IBM lab point of view.

• A nice example to compare bash and python to script report.

• The basics.

• The must-have book.