Comments on: Script day – Shutting down multiple servers at once

By: Eran

Eran — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:56:47 +0000

But the reason I use Magic File Renamer is that I wanted something that will make all the pictures I have look like this and all the audiobooks look like that and all the music albums look another way. And I thought of writing something myself but then there’s this cool tool that does it for me, remembers what I want and is perfectly good at its job.

By: Oded

Oded — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 21:01:33 +0000

See my reply to Eran below about Powershell. Regarding scripting – sure, but its like saying “you don’t need to install applications to do stuff – you can write the applications yourself”.

The point of the article is that a decently competent user can achieve more without getting into “developing applications” because the scripting tools are so handy that you don’t even feel like your are writing a script: want to convert all the underscores in your files to dashes? Just run
for file in *; do mv “$file” “${file/_/-}”; done
right at your command line – its more complicated to think about then to write it!

By: Oded

Oded — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 20:54:52 +0000

Well, I have tested it. They have some good things, like strong syntax, but they messed some other things completely – like pipes as object streams? Come on!

Regardless: CMD.exe is really primitive (like an early 80s UNIX shell), while Powershell is an external software package (like cygwin) you have to go and install it. If you have ever used Bash seriously and then tried to use cygwin or Powershell you’d know that its not on the same level. The reason is that its not only the shell – its about the entire system: Linux comes with tons of tools and applications that are geared to work nicely as components in a shell environment, while with MS-Windows you don’t even have a normal pager.

Compared to what you can get on MS-Windows (including cygwin), Linux is like working in a state-of-the-art workshop with more tools then you knew existed (and 5 sizes of each) compared to working in your garage with your ill fitting work desk, where half the time you can’t find the exact tool that you need and have to kludge it and the rest of the time your tool is not the exactly the size or shape that you need and you still have to kludge it.

By: Eran

Eran — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 06:38:44 +0000

Microsoft came out with Powershell not long ago but I haven’t tested it myself.

By: Amir

Amir — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 15:44:19 +0000

Real Windows administrators learn to use the Windows shell, CMD.EXE, and VBScript for the CScript engine, and the ones who are more open to the world also use Cygwin tools. Plus, I have been unemployed for more than a year now, so things might have improved since last time I administered a Windows machine — I recall having heard of a new Windows shell, and some POSIX tools coming from Microsoft.

By: Oded

Oded — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 14:54:02 +0000

Or just use Konsole with its “send input to all windows” feature.

There are a few reasons:
* This script actually make sure that a server was shutdown by pinging it. It will also elegantly skip hosts that are already down.
* Its automated – of course it is limited to just doing a shutdown, but it does this automatically with a single command – no need to run a full application with UI and everything. It will do its job cleanly and report the results in a simple way.
* It does not require X – you can run it from a VT or from a putty console on windows or anything
* I like writing scripts

By: Assi

Assi — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 12:44:45 +0000

Why not just use clusterssh ?

http://freshmeat.net/projects/clusterssh/