Windows OS vs Linux OS!
Windows OS vs Linux OS!
Windows started with BAT files (a combination of OS commands and optionally its own language) and then progressed to Windows Scripting Host (WSH) which supports two languages, JavaScript and VB Script. Windows also has WMI, the Windows Management Interface which makes many functions available to scripts. The lastest scripting engine from Microsoft is Windows Powershell (originally called Monad). The first release (excluding Betas) was November 2006. PowerShell requires version 2.0 of the Microsoft .NET Framework and runs only under Windows XP, Vista and Server 2003.(Updated May 2007)
Linux, like all Unix variants, provides multiple scripting languages, referred to as shell scripts. Among them are the Bourne shell, the C shell, Perl, Python and Ruby. I have used the first three, but not Python and Ruby. I find the Linux scripting languages cruder than WSH but much more powerful than BAT files. They tend to use special characters instead of English commands and don’t support objects (this only matters to programmers).
One scripting language that can run on both Linux and Windows is PHP. It always has to be installed under Windows, it may have to be installed under Linux. PHP is typically found running on Linux based web servers in combination with Apache, but it is capable of running "client side" (on your computer).
(The below was added May 2007)
There is a philosophy to scripting and starting with PowerShell Microsoft has changed theirs, to follow/copy that of Linux. The issue I’m referring to is the main interface to the operating system.
On Linux/Unix the scripts are the main interface to the system and any GUI is built on top of the scripts. Thus a Linux system can have multiple GUIs to accomplish the same thing as they all end up calling the script interface anyway. You can even run Linux without any GUI at all.
Windows has always been locked into and keyed off its GUI interface. Scripting was an after-thought. With the introduction of PowerShell, Microsoft says it will adopt the Linux way, making the script inteface the main one. This should mean that anything and everything can be scripted. We’ll see.


