Scripting for Penetration Testing
Mike Chapple, David Seidl · 2018
This chapter focuses on the role of scripting in penetration testing. The four scripting languages that are most commonly used in penetration tests are Bash, PowerShell, Ruby, and Python. The Bourne-again shell (Bash) is a scripting language commonly used on Linux and Mac systems. It's often the default environment available at the command line on those systems. PowerShell is another command shell scripting language, very similar to Bash. Like Bash and PowerShell, Ruby allows us to create a variable by simply declaring it. Variables are one of the core concepts in any scripting language. They allow developers to store information in memory using a descriptive name and then later reference that information in their script.