> Sorry, but I would consider you as one of the 'distinguished veterans of
> regular expressions' as referred to in my original message (hey, accept it
> or not -- it's not a bad sticker :-)
Absolutely. The Perl program is really only usable by people who know
enough Perl to get the "transformation code" argument syntactically
correct "on-the-fly". Basically, the program gives additional leverage
to people who are already experienced Perl programmers (and even sombody
with 12+ years of Perl experience like me wanted the "-n" switch), but
I wouldn't just hand it to a newbie and tell them to have at it.
> Now how would you transfer the perl's 'rename' to a perl's 'copy' (using
> destination replacement), or to a perl's anyThing source-to-destination ?
You end up having slightly different tools. Oh, I suppose I could add
a "-c" flag that does copy instead of rename, and "-s" to make symlinks,
etc. But if you want to fall back into the "Unix design religion"
argument from earlier posts (and I don't really), I'd say you'd create
different tools.
Another alternative would be to use the normal "cp" command to make a
copy of the files with their original name, and then use the Perl
"rename" to rename the files in the directory where you made the copy.
"There's more than one way to do it"-- originally a Perl motto, but
applicable to most things in Unix.
> I may have made a mistake (=offending people), by pushing python as a
> language to implement such a tool... Hey, if your favorite language has a
> better/different implementation, let us know !
The question with any tool is (a) does it do what you want it to do,
and (b) is it maintainable? If yes to both, then don't spend time
agonizing about whether you made the "right" choice.
Like Stallman says, "free software" also means freedom to choose. I
groove on Perl because it was what was available when I needed a
scripting language that was more powerful than sh/awk. I've lately
been pondering switching to Python if only because Perl 6 looks like
it's going to be a very different language than the "classic Perl" I
grew up with.
--
Hal Pomeranz, Founder/CEO Deer Run Associates [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Network Connectivity and Security, Systems Management, Training
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