source= http://www.piclist.com/postbot.asp?id=piclist\2003\02\10\083923a

I am not sure that this is completely relevant, but it seems to me what you
are looking for is not an interactive environment but rather a scripting
language or build tool.  In the Java community a build tool called Ant is
very popular.  It has a bunch of nice features:

Open source, free
Runs on pretty much any platform
Setup if more descriptive than procedural.
Very good at moving files, deleting files, and building lists of files and
feeding them to other tasks.
Extensible by running progmas in the environment of the host machine.
Also extensible by writing programs specifically for it ( most commonly in
java ).
Once a build is specified ( in an xml file ) either parts of the build or
the whole thing can be run from the command line.
Includes options for output often very useful for debugging.
Documented and actively maintaind.

Not so nice features.

Needs a java environment, I think just runtime, I have usually used the
whole sdk.  Free, but a lot of stuff to put on your computer if you have no
interest in Java.

Powerful but with that comes some complexity.

Overall might be worth a look:

http://ant.apache.org/

If you want to roll your own from a scripting language there are a ton:

Perl, Python, ....

Some of these have quite a learing curve themselves.  I think TCL may be a
little simpler than some of the others, but overall I would go the Ant route
( but then I do a fair amount of work in Java )  If Olin is interested I
would be willing to try to work with him to get something going.

Russ


---
Russ  Hensel
http://www.piclist.com/member/RH-yahoo-P43
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