Re: shell scripts.
James Pollard <pollard@cs.purdue.edu> writes:
| call me crazy, but after messing around with shell programming for a while, i
| discovered perl. i'm no major system programmer or admin or anything, but
| why on earth would someone ever want to use some shell programming language
| over perl?
One word, portability. Yes, Perl runs on just about any system, but
that doesn't mean it's installed on every system. It's also a moving
target, meaning if you develop a Perl script based on the latest
version of Perl you may find you want, or someone else wants, to run
it on a system that has an earlier version and you're stuck. This
argument also extends to using Bash extensions. Not every Unix box has
Bash and in large organizations it might be, and usually is, a huge
hassle to get the admin people to install something like this. On the
other hand I have yet to see a Unix system without a raw Bourne shell.
| especially since perl can run on almost any platform, so when
| whatever shell you are programming for fades away or when you switch from
| one platform to another, your perl scripts will live on.
Bourne shell? Fade away? hahahaha! ;) Only if Unix fades away and I
don't see that happening any time soon. At least I HOPE not!!
I'd argue that it's much more likely that Perl would change than the
raw Bourne shell. The Bourne shell has remained pretty much unchanged
since Unix was written. On the other hand, Perl has changed
significantly in just the last couple of years.
I do agree though, that, given a choice, Perl is much nicer to work
with than Bourne shell scripting, and I use it for most of my personal
scripting tasks.
Gary
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