From: "Hal E. Fulton" <hal9000@...>
Date: 2001-11-08T05:01:16+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:24584] Re: Is Ruby good for SysAdmin Automation Scripting

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Sridhar M <sreem@lycos.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ruby
To: ruby-talk ML <ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org>; <undisclosed-recipients: ;>
Sent: Wednesday, November 07, 2001 1:42 PM
Subject: [ruby-talk:24581] Is Ruby good for SysAdmin Automation Scripting


> Hi,
> I want to know if Ruby is suitable for SysAdmin Task automation
> scripts and
> CGI scripts, similar to Expext and Tcl. If so, I will be interested in
> learning and working with Ruby.

In my opinion, Ruby is very suitable for this kind of thing.
The fact that it has a rich set of standard classes (i.e., it's
a "real" language) makes it much more suitable than some
scripting languages. For example, if you have tried to do
sophisticated string handling in Kornshell, you will appreciate
Ruby's string capabilities.

You might want to check out the shell.rb library (mostly useful
in Unix); on Windows, you might want to look at WIN32OLE,
ActiveScriptRuby and maybe even WIN32API.

I've never used Expect myself, but I understand there's a
Ruby library to do some Expect-like stuff.

I've written a handful of CGIs in Ruby. Others have done a 
lot more. The current cgi.rb is stable and useful, though it
does have a quirk or two that make people talk about
rewriting it. 

HTH,
Hal