My experiences are different. I once rewrote from scratch an installer/upgrader for the product the company I worked for produced. The result, a 2.5k shell/awk program, using isql (Sybase command line tool) to do its interaction with the database. Initially developed on Solaris, but I knew it had to run on HP-UX and Windows NT as well. The porting took less than 30 minutes - I was using an option to grep HP-UX didn't know about, and Windows NT (which had a Unix toolkit installed) didn't know about /tmp.

Later, I've used shell scripts initially developped on Linux without much problems under Windows/cygwin.

Of course, you may say, Windows doesn't come with a Unix toolkit. You are right of course. But Windows doesn't come with Perl either, so whether you want to use Perl or shell to do your cross-platform scripting, you will have to install something.

Why I didn't write the installer I mentioned in the first paragraph in Perl, you may ask. Well, at that time, Solaris didn't come with perl, so we couldn't assume perl was available. And I hadn't convinced the company I worked for that we should just bundle perl with our product. Yet. A year later, I had to write a different installer. By then, we did bundle perl with our product, and that one was written in Perl. By the time, we had dropped Windows as a platform so I don't know whether it would have worked on Windows.

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