SysAdmin: Systems Administration with Scsh

“Shell scripting languages provide systems
administrators with powerful tools to automate mundane tasks,
saving hours of work. Most of these languages, however, do not
provide a well-designed object system, nor are they optimized for
recursion and abstraction. Scheme, a dialect of LISP, incorporates
all the features of a good programming language as listed above.
Because Scheme cannot interact with UNIX primitives alone, there is
a Scheme software package called scsh (the scheme shell). Scsh
provides a set of macros for the Scheme programming language,
adding the ability to call on all standard UNIX system calls and
even adds regular expressions.

In this article, I will briefly introduce and describe the
important features of the Scheme language and present some of my
own scripts written in scsh, which exhibit many of the listed
features. This article presumes that you know how to program using
Scheme. If you are new to Scheme, read the Notes section at the end
of this article, which provides numerous learning resources.”

Complete
Story