[X4U] Decent book on scripting language

[Daly Jessup]

Ed Gould asked:

>Can someone suggest a scripting language that will be able to test 
>easily if a file exists and *move* files from foldera to folderb (or 
>"c" or "d" or "e" etc)
>
>At first a friend suggested automater but he looked at it and said 
>he didn't think so.
>
>I would like to be able to use (what I call symbolics or someone 
>might call a variable)  eg: move &1stchartest.pdf to 
>folder&1stchat\&1stchartest.pdf
>this would (if 1st char was say a) move atest.pdf folder\atest.pdf 
>I know the example is not clear but the scripting language needs to 
>be able to actually move files and be able to have variable names 
>used in the file move as well as destinations.
>
>The languages I know this is extremely simple so I am guessing there 
>is one for Apple as well.
>
>Is there one, if so what is a decent book on it?

It seems to me that this could be done with a shell script in Unix. I 
don't know what would be a good book on Unix shell scripting, but 
I'll bet that a trip to the bookstore would let you find one that you 
like.

Then in Automator there is an Action in the Automator Library to "Run 
shell script" so once you had the shell script, you could add it as 
an Automator workflow to the Finder's contextual menu.

Another option might be to use Perl. It says at this page that it is 
built in to OS X. I didn't know that. And this article suggests using 
BBEdit to do your scripting.
<http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.18/18.09/PerlforMacOSX/index.html>

Daly
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