What you mention (solving the problem from subversion) is certainly a good idea as well, but it seems a bit less general-purpose. I have the same issue when I have just created a sample project that I want to zip up, excluding the bin and obj folders.

Python? Yeah, sure… I wouldn’t agree that it’s *the* Swiss army knife of scripting - there have been enough other languages around that earned that title in their time, and Python in still young In any case, I tend to go for what I perceive to be the simplest solution. If there are a few shell commands to automate, I find it easiest to hack them into a console, try them out and finally echo them into a shell script file, make some minor modifications for automation purposes and I’m done. Perl would be my next step in many cases, i.e. when there’s just a little more processing to be done than can easily be handled with "grep"s. That’s one problem I see with more advanced scripting languages: they often move away from the basics. Shell scripting is a totally natural extension of using shell commands, which I know how to use anyway. Perl is, in many areas, just one step away from that - slightly different syntax, slightly more advanced control structures and so on - of course there’s a lot on top of that, but I’m still talking about the basic tasks. Python? I’ve used it for applications, never tried to use it as a glueing language. And there’s a similar reason why I haven’t tried using PowerShell for this kind of task yet… it sure has its own set of extremely powerful commands that can be glued together, but it’ll probably be years for the casual user to come up to the same level of efficiency with these commands that he might have achieved with Unix tools being a sysadmin at university.

As for scripting, I use python, it’s the swiss army knife of scripting.

Now, let’s make a copy of this post before clicking submit.