Thanks Danny and everyone else who responded to this question. I think I have enough 'ammo' so we can close this thread. Thanks again. :-)
Tony Esposito Oracle Developer, Enterprise Business Intelligence XO Communications Plano, TX 75074 Ph: 972-516-5344 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: Danny Faught [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2003 7:20 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Perl versus UNIX Korn Shell 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 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. -- Danny R. Faught Tejas Software Consulting http://tejasconsulting.com/
