On Wed, Nov 05, 2003 at 04:19:44PM -0500, Esposito, Anthony wrote: > How would you convince someone that programming in Perl is better than > using the UNIX Korn Shell? > > I need some `intellectual ammo' to convince my colleagues that Perl is a > better, more powerful language, to do our scripting. Any suggestions? J
Well... the right tool for the right job, I'd say. If the scripting you're speaking of is limited to basic filesystem functions, no real math of any sort, and very simple parsing, then the Korn shell is fine. When extended with a few tools - "grep", "cat", 'bc", "sed", and "awk" - Korn is actually quite powerful. However, shell scripts are _very_ slow, and any loops that process largish amounts of information can get pretty horrendous. There are endless things you can do with Perl where the shell would just barely limp along, or simply be unable to accomplish the job at all, but if your colleagues are seriously trying to compare the two, then I suspect that the scope of what you're doing probably does not include those. As a small comparison, one of my students had a shell script that processed a pair of files, about 75MB each, by doing _something_ (I don't remember the exact details) that involved taking a line from file1 and doing something to every line in file2 based on it, then moving down a line in file1 and repeating the process (note that this was done on some very fast and powerful Sun hardware.) According to his literally shell-shocked account on the third morning of a week-long Perl course, the time to run the script went from over 20 minutes to under 45 seconds when it was rewritten in Perl. Rewriting, by the way, only took him about ten minutes - the script was not very complex. For myself, I've used a mix of Bash and Perl (10/90) to do literally every scripting task I've needed to accomplish for the past N years (I'm feeling too lazy to battle my forgettery at the moment. :) I wouldn't want to be without either one, but if had to, Perl would be the winnah and champeen. * Ben Okopnik * okopnik.freeshell.org * Technical Editor, Linux Gazette * -*- See the Linux Gazette in its new home: <http://linuxgazette.net/> -*-
