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.
Python is what you want. You can install it on just about any system.
Other than that maybe Lua but that will be hell.
Perl and bash are already there, no need to install anything.
Perl isn’t normally preinstalled by Python is. (On Linux)
Try it now - go on. Type “perl” and tell me what you get.
And if you’re so certain it’s not used, try removing it and see how well your computer works afterwards.
Welp, can’t argue with that
It isn’t installed
I know that because I installed it as it was a dependency of Buildroot.
Edit: My bad I must of been thinking about a Perl library
If you just run perl it will sit waiting for input. Try perl --version
Once git no longer depends on it, it’ll be gone from my system
Is this the case? I don’t feel like I’ve ever had to install Perl but I’ve had to install Python plenty of times and I use both pretty frequently on a daily basis. Not to mention a newer version, older version, 2.7.4 instead of 2.7.3.
Python 2 is no longer supported and shouldn’t be used.
Um, exactly the opposite on all the distros I use. All Enterprise Linux distros, Suse and Debian.