Are the skills in batch scripting valuable (for you,for employers and etc.)?

[npocmaka_]

As a person a little bit obsessed with the the batch scripting this is a question that I'm scared to ask myself and honestly even avoid to answer ....
It will be interesting to hear another opinions.

According to me - No with a declining tendency (despite this will probably will not make less interested on the topic).

First of all it is not recognized by the employers as useful technology - most of IT professionals consider the batch scripts as something that allows them to execute their programs/scripts rather something that deal with more complicated logic. The syntax of more powerful commands is too different to the normal programming languages and almost nobody wants to invest time in learning it. And batch files have too limited capabilities after all. It's impossible to have a job only with knowledge in batch/(WSH) even for sysadmins. I even don't think it will be noticeable point in your resume.


The main plus of the batch scripting is the backward compatibility - mainly with Win2003 (as a server OS it is the most important), WinXP and Vista (which has no powershell installed by default). But these OSes have less and less market share (if Vista has some at all).

The other is that batch files are fast (in most of the cases) compared to powershell - this also is valid for WSH.

Looks like the future is powershell (with a little bit javascript due to node+typescript and at some degree jscript.net and jscript) :

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http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/%22batch+script%22.html
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/vbscript.html
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/powershell.html

[foxidrive]

Batch skills allow me to do so much work and processing in my own personal use - they are very valuable.

For most businesses I reckon it is the sysadmin who scripting is the most useful for... but is it useful in a resume in most other jobs - probably not IMO.

[Meerkat]

My Opinion: Sometimes, but (very) rare.

From what I observed, Batch Files are used in commercial products as "starters" (Sorry I cannot think a better word) for one or many executable files if it/they should be run with certain switches. (I see this in many games)...

The only "known" "utility" I saw written (somewhat) in Batch is Malwarebytes's JRT.
Link: https://www.malwarebytes.org/junkwareremovaltool/

Note: I am not even working (I am a student), so maybe I am wrong about certain things.

Meerkat

[Squashman]

My main job at work is data automation. We do have software that does the bulk of this but we still heavily rely on batch files to fill in the gaps and it works quite nicely. I looked at using Powershell back in 2008 but it was overkill for what we do.

I have been pretty active on StackOverflow the past few months and I see a lot of developers integrating it with all kinds of languages and processes. My personal belief is it is still valuable.

[npocmaka_]

My main job at work is data automation. We do have software that does the bulk of this but we still heavily rely on batch files to fill in the gaps and it works quite nicely. I looked at using Powershell back in 2008 but it was overkill for what we do.

I have been pretty active on StackOverflow the past few months and I see a lot of developers integrating it with all kinds of languages and processes. My personal belief is it is still valuable.

Hmm.. Stackoverflow is good place to check a programming language popularity:

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powershell - 30,530 questions tagged (54th place)
batch - 28,087 questions tagged(71th place)
vbscript - 12,315 questions tagged
jscript - 716 questions tagged (I thought the number will be similar to vbscript)
jscript.net - 78 questions tagged (so little !) 

But one big part of the questions in Stackoverflow are related to
1) Delayed expansion (pretty unusual thing for people used to 'normal' programming languages)
2) Declaring variable with a space before equal sign , and then trying to access it.

which means most of the question posters have no and never have a deeper knowledge in batch scripting.

[aGerman]

The lack of good evaluation modules in our old ERP system forced me to start with Batch scripting years ago. Actually it wasn't much helpful for data processing. I mostly used it to automate the organization of export files and analysis files.
Nowadays I don't have much use for Batch anymore. It's rather for fun ...

[ShadowThief]

I voted yes, on the technicality that I've received raises at work for the scripts that I wrote in batch (admittedly because I don't regularly use any other languages besides VBA) that have significantly improved productivity.

Would a different language be better for a script that parses timestamps from a log file to track system downtime? Probably, but my bosses were just impressed you could just drag the log file onto the script.

[Ed Dyreen]

I definitely use my knowledge when writing short robust batch files. Sometimes I need to execute some commands from the console, because the current language can't accomplish it or because the project is too small to convert or just as a proof of a concept. Knowing how the shell works is good, too much noobs writing silly code.

I do some automation in batch, vbscript and autoit. Not that I wrote a single batch line in the past two months but there is something addictive about batch. It's fun.

I am currently documenting some of the things I know on my site and I lately had some ideas.
I have thought out a new way to use and document functions. I got the idea from the java API specification which uses javadoc.exe to generate HTML from the sourcecode. When I'm done with that I promise I'll never talk about batch again!