Scripting Glossary

Browse 14 scripting terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

14 Scripting Terms

Bash
The Bourne Again Shell, the default command-line interpreter on most Linux distributions and macOS. Bash scripts are the glue of Unix system administration,...
Groovy
A dynamic language for the JVM designed as a companion to Java, offering concise syntax, closures, and built-in support for working with XML, JSON, and...
Here Document
A type of string literal in shell scripting and several programming languages that preserves line breaks and allows embedding of multi-line text inline,...
Lua
A lightweight, embeddable scripting language designed for extending applications. Lua's tiny footprint and fast VM make it the dominant embedded scripting...
Lua Module
A self-contained Lua script that returns a table of functions and values, loaded via `require()`. Lua's module system uses the `package.path` and...
Perl
A high-level, general-purpose scripting language originally designed for text manipulation and report generation. Known as the 'Swiss Army chainsaw' of...
PHP
A server-side scripting language that powers an estimated 77% of websites with known server-side languages, including WordPress, Facebook (as Hack), and...
PowerShell
Microsoft's task automation framework and command-line shell, built on .NET and designed around the concept of passing objects (not text) between commands....
PowerShell Module
A self-contained, reusable package of PowerShell functions, cmdlets, variables, and resources distributed as a .psm1 file (script module) or compiled .dll...
Ruby
A dynamic, object-oriented scripting language designed for developer happiness and productivity. Ruby's elegant syntax and the Ruby on Rails web framework...
Script Block
In PowerShell, a block of code enclosed in curly braces that can be stored in a variable, passed as a parameter, or invoked later, functioning similarly to...
Subshell
A child shell process spawned by the current shell to execute commands in an isolated environment, where variable changes and directory changes do not affect...
Val Town
A social website for writing and deploying small programs (called 'vals') that run on the server. Each val is a TypeScript function that gets its own URL...
Variable Expansion
The shell mechanism that replaces a variable reference ($VAR or ${VAR}) with its value before executing a command. Supports default values (${VAR:-default}),...

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