Shell Programming and Scripting

I am sure this is not the best place to ask this question.
I have recently in work inherited support of some windows servers..
I have (thankfully) never had to support windows servers to date and my background is in unix only and quite of lot of ksh scripting etc..

I have some - what I would call - simple tasks to set up that I would normally just write a script for and email the output..
I need to monitor directories for files coming in etc, disk space, check application processes etc...

Any help on where I can start with windows etc? any other web sites that can help? I dont want to have to spend 3 weeks reading material etc

In the Windows world, you can still write bat files: bat files. When XP came out, Microsoft introduced Windows Scripting Host: WSH. WSH offers several languages and I used VBScript to write some stuff. I hear that now Microsoft has developed Powershell: Powershell which I have not yet tried.

bat files have been around forever and probably always will be...not exactly a super-powered language though. WSH seems to be a failed experiment...it had security problems and a lot of folks disable it. Powershell is new and you may need to install it before you use it. It seems like the way of the future... but then so did WSH. But these are the official Microsoft scripting languages. You can also install various other freeware languages.

If you need a free, decent, unix guest operating system under windows, download cygwin:

http://www.cygwin.com/mirrors.html

It interacts with devices and files on the Windows box/network. We use rsynch to keep a bunch PC servers loaded with current data -- under cygwin.