PHP is a fantastic system scripting language IMO. Much more ergonomic for the task than Python. But I'll do you one better: Perl. Perl is incredibly stable and

PHP is a fantastic system scripting language IMO. Much more ergonomic for the task than Python. But I'll do you one better: Perl. Perl is incredibly stable and ergonomic for system scripting. It's probably the most ergonomic scripting lang I've ever used. The benefit is Perl is robust, unchanging for decades at a time, and available on pretty much every system. Bash is not portable, Perl is.