For simple things on the command line it is usually easiest to use a language you're comfortable with if there is also good libraries availible. If you write C+

For simple things on the command line it is usually easiest to use a language you're comfortable with if there is also good libraries availible. If you write C++ all day you can use C++ for file mungling if you find the libraries you need (for example html-parsing or xml-parsing). I used to write scripts in Ruby since I liked the syntax, it was very easy, nowdays I have tried javascript since I use it anyway in web projects and Node/NPM has a lot of modules ready. One thing I like with scripting languages is that I usually need to tweak the script a bit over time and that is very easy to do with scripting languages, even on different computers which may or may not have a compiler.