Shell Programming and Scripting

Again this depends what your database interactions are.

If you have standard static queries, then it is possible that scripts will be fine. If on the other hand you want to apply business logic and create dynamic queries, then it is probable that java(or another high level language) will be more flexible and maintainable, the exception being that you could also do this in perl if this qualifies as a scripting language.

no reborg...thanks for that output....but we can't use perl...does unix bash support exception handling?
and mainly static database interactions......

I think you mean "does shell scripting have exception handling".

UNIX is really the operating system. You are comparing shell scripting with Java programming, not unix programming.

To me, traditional UNIX programming means Kernighan and Ritchie C.

am bit confused with your blog....its like the OS is Unix deffinitely.....but do unix shell script be able to take up exception handling with number of file operations....we are not in a scope to use C and unix API's....purely shell script or java....whichever make the work done....am trying to back unix shell script but it being a scripting language will it be able to take up the complicasies easily.....what do u think that shell script can do and Java can't....?

Tweaked on the fly without recompiling.

First off, please punctuate your posts correctly. They are difficult to read with the inappropriate use of elipsis.

Work on a system where java is not installed

Seriously though, we cannot advise you if we don't know what your workload characteristic and business logic are. I don't mean to be rude here, but I would say that if you are not in a position to answer these questions yourself then you are not in a position to argue that shell scripting is appropriate to your needs.

So Java is a virtual machine. It has abstracted so much of the physical environment that allows it to reliably model most of the runtime errors as exceptions in a unified manner. You cannot expect an environment that lacks similar kinds of facilities to give you identical support. This is especially true of the Unix shell.

In a nutshell, generally speaking, if you have to do some Unix-specific operations, such as grepping and processing the output of "ps -aux", it's probably best to have all those processing in shell scripts. For more high-level programming with a more concrete sense of application logic, such as those involving DB access, you should likely use a more structured programming language such as C/C++/Java. Programs written in these languages are generally easier to debug when they grow large as there are ample support of tools for debugging in those environments, compared with the Unix shell.