Apart from its use as a powerful Web application development platform, in combination with the Rails framework Ruby is also a powerful scripting language. It has immense capabilities, owing to the availability of many built-in and external libraries, the power of which can be harnessed to solve a great deal of the scripting needs that surface in typical systems administrative work environments.
I’m a Python guy, rather than a Ruby guy. But Ruby and Python are kissing-cousins, so this is likely relevant.
One thing that strikes me as interesting about this area of application is that in “The Python Cookbook” there is a chapter on system administration. And the chapter introduction comments that most of the examples are for Windows because the vast majority of input from users (the book was largely user-driven) was from Windows admins. Unix admins didn’t send in suggestions or code samples for that chapter. Presumably shell script is used by them, and Python is not really needed.
I’ve thought about introducing more Python into my system administration. But heck, it’s just too easy to hack up an ugly shell script that does the job nicely. And shell script *is* god-awful ugly! 😉
Edited 2008-12-10 21:41 UTC
More likely they use Perl. Almost every Unix SA I know uses either some Shell derivative or Perl or both.