Portable scripting language for a multi-server admin?

Question

Please Note: Portable as in portableapps.com, not in the traditional sense of a language that can be used on multiple architectures or operating systems. Whoever coined this usage of the word portable should be whacked. :)

I'm a DBA and sysadmin, mostly for Windows machines running SQL Server. I'm looking for a programming/scripting language for Windows that doesn't require Admin access or an installer, needing no install process other than expanding it into a folder. My intent is to have a language for automation around which I can standardize.

Up to this point, I've been using a combination of batch files and Unix shell, using sh.exe from UnxUtils but it's far from a perfect solution.

I've evaluated a handful of options, all of them have at least one serious shortcoming or another. I have a strong preference for something open source or dual license, but I'm more interested in finding the right tool than anything else. Not interested that anything that relies on Cygwin or Java, but at this point I'd be fine with something that needs .NET.

Requirements:

• Manageable footprint (1-100 files, under 30 MB installed)
• Run on Windows XP and Server (2003+)
• No installer (exe, msi)
• No reliance on a JVM or Cygwin install
• Works with external pipes, processes, and files
• Support for MS SQL Server or ODBC connections

Bonus Points:

• Open Source
• FFI for calling functions in native DLLs
• GUI support (native or gtk, wx, fltk, etc)
• Linux, AIX, and/or OS X support
• Dynamic, object oriented and/or functional, interpreted or bytecode compiled; interactive development
• Able to package or compile scripts into executables

So far I've tried:

• Ruby: 148 MB on disk, 23000 files
• Portable Python: 54 MB on disk, 2800 files
• Strawberry Perl: 123 MB on disk, 3600 files
• REBOL: Great, except closed source and no MSSQL or ODBC in free version
• Squeak Smalltalk: Great, except poor support for scripting

Answer 1

Tclkit is a single-file, self-contained Tcl/Tk system. The mac version I have is about 3.8 megs. You can get a version for just about any modern OS. I carry around a thumb drive that has mac, windows and linux binaries so I can run my scripts on any platform. No install is required, just copy one file wherever you want.

The only thing it's missing from your original spec is MS SQL Server / ODBC support out of the box. I know people use tcl for that but I think you'll have to add an extra library or something. See the Tcl'ers wiki entry on MS SQL Server for more information.

Answer 2

There are a couple of options for Python that might fit your bill:

• The first is IronPython, which can be run without an installer and will play nicely with .net APIs. This gives you access to anything with a .net API or a COM typelib that you could build a PIA for. I've used at as a scripting mechanism for precisely this reason - it could be dropped into a directory within the system and did not need to be explicitly installed..
  
  You will have to have an appropriate .Net runtime installed, but .Net 2.0 is installed with SQL Server 2005. SQL Server can be accessed through ADO.net and building GUIs with Winforms is fairly straightforward.

• The second is Portable Python which is designed to be run off a USB key. Although I see you've already tried it, you might elaborate on what the shortcomings were. If something isn't available in the basic install you could always look into building a custom version with it included. TkInter (at least) is bundled.
  
  You can also use Py2EXE to generate standalone python applications with all superfluous junk stripped out. This will give you about 10 files or so (depending on the number of DLLs) that can be run from a single directory, possibly on a USB key.

Running local python installs on Unix-oid OS's is pretty straightforward, so that's pretty much a no brainer. Also, python comes with most linux distros and is available as 'contributed software' from most if not all trad unix vendors. IIRC it's also bundled with MacOS.

Answer 3

For tcl, apart from Tclkit, freewrap is another small portable, self-contained interpreter for tcl.

Just rename the freewrap executable to something else will convert it to a stand-alone interpreter. Renaming it back to freewrap will convert it to a script wrapper.

Also, freewrapped apps contain a tcl interpreter. In dire emergencies you can try opening the app as a zip file and edit/replace the tcl code contained within (just remember to make a copy first). This has saved me several times when I'm at a client site without development tools but need to troubleshoot something. I just make a copy of one of my deployed app and presto - instant development environment!

Answer 4

Looking at wikipedia's exhaustive list of portable software There's Tiny C compiler, again on Wikipedia here, and its own homepage here.

To summarize by quoting from wikipedia's list of features:

• Small - can compile and execute C code everywhere, for example on rescue disks (about 100KB for x86 TCC executable, including C preprocessor, C compiler, assembler and linker).
• Fast - tcc generates optimized x86 code. No byte code overhead. It compiles, assembles and links about 9 times faster than GCC.
• Any C dynamic library can be used directly. TCC is heading towards full ISOC99 compliance. TCC can of course compile itself.
• Includes an optional memory and bound checker. Bound checked code can be mixed freely with standard code.
• Compile and execute C source directly. No linking or assembly necessary. Full C preprocessor and GNU-like assembler included.
• C script is supported: just add '#!/usr/local/bin/tcc -run' at the first line of your C source, and execute it directly from the command line.
• With libtcc, you can use TCC as a backend for dynamic code generation.
• Few dependencies. It includes its own hand-written lexer, and it is implemented using a recursive descent parser. Thus, building TCC requires few other libraries.
• Its LGPL license permits anyone to use, modify, and/or redistribute the software, and it can be used to develop either open source or proprietary software.

Hope this helps and would be of use, Best regards, Tom.

Answer 5

In addition to the Lua suggestion, there is also Idle. It is basically a superset of Lua 5.1, with both the language (and libraries) and the implementation based on Lua. It was originally created to be a more complete scripting solution for Windows: because Lua is primarly intended for embedding, it has a rather small standard library and it is usually expected that the embedding application provides a rich library to Lua.

This makes sense for an embedded language, because, after all, there isn't much common functionality between, say Adobe Lightroom, Nginx and World of Warcraft, so there simply is nothing you can put in a standard library. But for a more general purpose OS scripting language, one would want a slightly larger library. Thus, Idle bundles a couple of libraries that are third-party (and sometimes hard to get to work on Windows) in Lua in its standard library.

Some of the things that the Idle standard library adds over Lua are tight Win32 integration, SQLite3 support, networking support, a PEG parser generator and archive support.

Also, Idle has support for embedding Perl and C code into your Idle programs.

Answer 6

Every somewhat modern Windows version comes pre-installed with both VBScript and JScript. The doesn't meet all your features (compile to an executable comes to mind), but they certainly have an unbeatable advantage with the installation size: it's hard to beat 0.