Well, I’d start by saying that linux has a superior story here vs batch files.
The most direct equivalent is bash/shell scripts. However, they are far more capable. Better conditional statements, loops, variables, text manipulation. It’s always shocking to me how limited batch files are when I’ve had to deal with them. Bash/shell are more equivalent to powershell if you are familiar with that.
But if you want something nicer/more powerful, then nearly every linux distro at this point ships with python. That’s what I’d probably use if I needed more than 100 lines of code. As a bonus you can also install python on windows/mac and keep using those scripts.
If I wanted to install something additionally though, then I do really like the asthetics of ruby. But it’s by no means as popular.
Perl is the old guard here and it does generally exist on all linux systems. However, I think python is superior in basically every way.












Not if you don’t want to. It’s an option outlined in the gentoo docs but for first time gentoo users they recommend just grabbing sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel-bin