[selfhoster11]

Building a Docker image gives basically full freedom over the choice of a runtime. If your Dockerized application is written in Java or Python or PHP or C#, why not just write the tooling and scripts in the same language too? Or at least install a suitable runtime just for the scripts? Or if starting from an empty container, why not build the script into a statically-linked binary to be placed next to the application?

[cogman10]

Typically, you want docker images as slim as possible. Both to make it faster to distribute and to prevent attacks if something escapes your application. The less in the image, the less exploitable your image is.

Beyond keeping the images slim, the times I'd reach for awk when dealing with a docker container would be when I'm debugging problems within that container. I might need to do some quick text parsing or finagling in order to troubleshoot why the application is sucking.

I'd rather not need to upload a Java script into my docker container just for quick troubleshooting.

[selfhoster11]

I agree on the slimness of Docker images, but if you e.g. have some kind of video or photo CMS written in PHP, then any housekeeping or export scripts etc are better off being written in PHP as well (or even integrated into the application) given how close they're already bound with the rest of the application.

For anything beyond that, I would very greatly prefer to have "black box", extremely verbose log dumps and database dumps that I could analyse over at my actual dev machine, or a good debugger that lets me step through the code to figure out what's going wrong.

I do realise that not all languages have good tooling, or that some people prefer to use `printf` style debugging, so it may not apply to all.