Newbie: Can Python replace unix scripts ?

[Joshua Macy]

Thanh Nguyen wrote:
> 
> I am from the win32 world and about to do some unix programming.
> I am scared stiff of the csh scripts because they are in my point of view,
> unreadable.
> 
> Can Python spare me of that csh scripting ?
> 
> Or  may be somebody point me to some other scripting language that
> are more user friendly than those unix scripting languages ?
> 
> thanks.


  By and large, anything that you might want to do with csh or Bash you
can accomplish with Python.  Pay particular attention to the os and
os.path modules, since they give you most of the needed hooks into the
operating system services. os.system and the various os.execNN are of
particular interest for invoking programs outside of Python if you run
into services that Python and its modules don't offer already. I'm sure
that the gurus can point out things that can only be accomplished, or
best accomplished with the shell languages, but as a newbie those
probably aren't the things that are uppermost on your mind to do.

  Joshua