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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Recommend me a scripting language (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

I've looked into this a lot actually. There see many options. I'll highlight the pros and cons of each option.

Lua: extremely lightweight, but standard library is lacking, and doesn't include stuff like map or fold. But that would be easy to fix.

Python: thicc standard library, but is not lightweight by any means. There are modifications made to be more shell like, such as xonsh

Rash: based on scheme, very much functional but if you're not used to lisp style, might take a bit to get used to it. This is actually my favorite option. It has a cli interpreter, and really pleasant to use. Cons is... Well it's not very common

You can honestly use any language. Even most compiled languages have a way to run immediately.