We are not programmers, but enjoy writing the occational program. If you have ever used the Unix shell, you will know that you have a very powerfull scripting language at your disposal. I wrote numerous interface programs between different programms or extract information. As an example, I wrote a sh script to extract all the information from an invoice before it is send to a printer and then produce labels for shipping.

On a different system, I had to save the reports from an application on a server to be viewed at a later date. I captured the printer output into a file with a special backend driver for cups on a linux computer.. The backend driver then moves the file into a special directory structure. HTML tags is added to the file to convert it to an HTML page. A PHP script creates the menu's so the documents can be viewed with a web browser.

There are many scripting languages. For most of my work, I use PHP. What is nice about PHP is that I can use it for dynamic web pages, scripting and gui applications. Also, I can use it in Linux and Windows. This means I can reuse my code over and over again.

A personal project of mine was to record my bilable time on a computer in my car. I connected a GPS to a small ASUS notebook computer and wrote a PHP gui program to record my times.

On Microsoft Windows and server systems, it is sometimes a better idea to use VB script.