In recent years, IT operations staff has turned to software development to help simplify their day-to-day tasks through scripting and automation. In this chapter, we will look at ways that DevOps can use CoffeeScript to perform some common tasks.

We will begin by demonstrating how we can execute shell commands from our CoffeeScript files using Node's child_process library.

We will then see how we can manage our filesystem with our scripts, including copying, moving, deleting, and archiving files and directories.

Next, we will see how we can load and parse Comma-separated Values (CSV) and fixed-width files.

We will end the chapter by looking at ways we can format date and numeric data that is better suited for human interpretation.