cross-platform scripting for windows, Linux, MacOS X [closed]

Question

I'm looking for cross-platform scripting (language) for windows, Linux, MacOS X. I'm tired of .bat / bash .

I would like to do things like for example ,,lock workstation'' at automatic login (I had this in X-Window but the solution was pretty ugly; now, I would like that on MS Windows and not that ugly :-) ).
Generally: automate tasks.

Or would I be better off with Windows Scripting Host?
PowerShell also comes to mind, but that's seems to Windows-only for my taste. Can languages like Python, Ruby, (Java?) interact (elegantly? sensibly?) with WSH?

Also things like DBUS, DCOM, etc come to mind as part of the picture.

Currently I use a mixture of Java, .bat, bash, Ruby, Scala; some VBA for Excel. Which sometimes gets pretty ugly.

I would like a cross-platform general solution with/using ,,native'' parts close to OS-specifics. Like e.g. Ruby driving some Windows-specific stuff (just a guess).
What do You use?
TIA

Answer 1

I'm a huge fan of Lua:

• Syntax is vaguely Pascal-like and works well in scripts.

• Superb power-to-weight ratio. Superb engineering. Very good design.

• Extremely portable to any platform with an ANSI C compiler.

• GUI support through wxLua and other bindings

• Some support for hiding OS differences in common tasks, e.g., the Lua File System add-on

• The core system and libraries are simple enough that you can understand all of what you're using, but still have excellent leverage compared to bash/bat. Expressive power is comparable to Python or Ruby.

• You're not overwhelmed with libraries and frameworks, which can be a plus or a minus.

• There is an excellent book: Roberto Ierusalimschy's Programming in Lua; you can get the previous edition free online.

• Performance beats tcl, perl, python, ruby

• For even faster performance on x86 hardware, there is LuaJIT.

• Finally, and this is the ace in the hole: if you run into any kind of platform-specific problem, it is easy to write platform-specific C code and load it into a Lua script dynamically. Lua was designed with this task in mind and does it extremely well. You can also easily dip into C for performance (e.g., compute MD5 checksum).

Over the last 3 to 5 years, I have been gradually migrating scripts from bash/ksh/awk/sed/grep/perl into Lua. I have been very happy with the results.

Answer 2

You could try Batsh

Batsh is a simple programming language that compiles to Bash and Windows Batch. It enables you to write your script once runs on all platforms without any additional dependency.