Most applications provide ways to script themselves automatically. For example, PPPD, the program most people use to contact an ISP and hook up to the Internet, automatically calls a script, "ip-up", when the connection is up. I personally use this script to synchronize my time with the Navy's atomic clock, download any email on the server, get my IP address and update my web page with it so others can contact my system, and more.
The 'find' function in Unix is astoundingly flexible, and among other things you can find all files of a particular type that were modified today and have a size greater than 53K and execute a script to process them in some way.
In addition to being a full programming environment, the shell offers ways to make 'aliases'. If I type "alias ls='ls --color=auto'", every time I execute the "ls" command (list files, like DIR in DOS), it will automatically colorize the files based on type. Of course I can customize the colors used.
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