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Ruby is a really good Unix citizen and I think it’s woefully underused as a general-purpose "scripting" language.

This article is a nice background and introduction to using Ruby for scripting. I've always felt that small, expressive scripts are one of Ruby's strong suits. When I need a personal one-off script to automate a set of steps, I almost always reach for Ruby.

Here is a fun tidbit:

I think this ancestral timeline may be interesting:

• 1977 AWK by Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan

• 1987 Perl by Larry Wall

• 1995 Ruby by Yukihiro Matsumoto

I had no idea that awk was so named because it is the initials of the creators.