use Perl

• Hmmm (Score:2)

  by jordan (120)

  I'm not much of a shell programmer, not much of a Perl programmer for that matter, but this seems counter to my experience.

  Whenever I write shell scripts, I always miss the ease of manipulating filenames and dates and times that I get in Perl. While I can see how you can save a few keystrokes performing some tasks in shell over Perl, like copying files and the like, I don't see any big wins in brevity with shell over Perl.

  Also, I believe, although I've not actually checked, that Perl startup is not that
• shell scripts (Score:4, Informative)

  by gav (2710) on 2004.01.15 14:32 (#27432) Homepage Journal

  I try to limit myself to shell scripts under 10 or so lines. I've found that if I want to do more it's better having it re-written in Perl. Otherwise you end up with big scary shell scripts.

  Reply to This

  • Re:shell scripts (Score:1)

    by Mr. Muskrat (4572)

    10?!?? If I hit 5 lines, I start looking to Perl. If it's less that 5 lines, I generally try to refine it to the point that it will work as an alias.
    • Re:shell scripts (Score:2)

      by Dom2 (2981)

      If you use zsh, you can get quite a lot done in those 5 lines. Of course, it makes obfuscated perl look like a model of sanity.

      -Dom
• Shell is lovely but Perl is better (Score:1)

  by oneiron (2615)

  Bourne shell is lovely. However, as someone who has written a lot of shell and Perl over the years, I use shell only for very short scripts indeed -- or when the script must run on a system that may not have Perl installed.

  Many times I've started with a shell script, seen it grow to 50 lines, then 100, then ... only to have to rewrite the damned thing in Perl. I could have saved a lot of time and trouble by writing it in Perl in the first place.

  As for shell being shorter, I've found that not to be the c

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