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
The shell doesn't do most of the work. Mostly, you're calling external programs, like grep, cat, sort, etc. These don't all have a consistent interface, and they differ from one system to another. Plus, you'll likely end up having to learn sed and/or awk.
Why learn all these different tools, plus perhaps two additional languages (sed and awk)? It's all available in Perl, plus much more, including a nice debugger. And well-written Perl scripts are portable.
BTW, if you insist writing a shell script and need something like awk, why not use Perl instead of awk?
There are a few cases where I would favor bash over Perl - when it's easier to call several existing utilities than to install additional Perl modules (avoid the clutter of those system("...") calls), and when I have a very short script that needs to redirect its output to a file.
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Danny R. Faught
Tejas Software Consulting
http://tejasconsulting.com/
