Script (computer programming)

In computer applications, a script, roughly speaking, is a computer program that automates the sort of task that a user might otherwise do interactively at the keyboard. A shell script often consists largely of the sort of commands that might be typed at a Unix prompt, or in a word processing program a user might write a script that would combine a sequence of editing tasks that the user expects to perform repeatedly. Languages that are largely used to write such scripts are called scripting languages. Many such languages are quite sophisticated, and have been used to write elaborate programs, which are often still called scripts even if they go well beyond automating simple sequences of user tasks.