This may be better suited in a programming subreddit, but being that it's about configuring servers and I'm not sure which programming subreddit it would be best suited in, I'm just going to leave this here.
I am a sysadmin/field tech for a company that sets up Point of Sale systems. There are a lot of tasks which would be much more efficient if they were automated, but it's more than can be done with scripts. I want to write a simple command line program, similar to the way it's done in my home land (linux). (example: http://av5.com/imgs/docs/cryptfs/cryptfs-26-2.png ). All it really needs to do is parse and set variables in some basic .ini files, look for marker files, and some other basic stuff that I should be able to figure out easily enough.
My question to you is, where do I start? Which language do you recommend, are there libraries for this sort of thing, etc. I did some "programming" many years ago (about a decade or more, and it was VB3/VB5) so it wouldn't be difficult for me to get back into it or learn a new language. It's a pet project, there isn't a deadline and I'm perfectly happy learning as I go. My only restriction is that it has to be 100% portable, and able to be run on any basic windows machine without having to install any sort of interpreter, vm, re, etc.
Thanks!
EDIT
Thanks for the replies, but everything points to something that has to be installed or copied over before running, and that's just not an option. We have literally thousands of servers, everything from Win2000 to Server 2008; I have to be able to get onsite, pop in a flash drive and run my solution. That's why I was aiming for an executable rather than a powershell script or something like perl or python. Also, as I mentioned but probably should have clarified, it's beyond the scope of what can be done with Batch scripts.
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