perl and other "non-standard" commands (was Re: cascading pipes in awk)

[David Elliott]

In article <8557 at chinet.chi.il.us> les at chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) writes:
>And I'm amazed that no one has suggested using perl instead, since

Sometimes it isn't appropriate to use commands that aren't standard in
commercial Unix systems.  I am working on a project right now that has
to run on SunOS 4.0 as distributed.  I can't assume that the customer
will have perl, GNU awk, or even nawk, even though any of these would
make my project significantly easier.  When Sun decides to make these
standard (soon for nawk, who knows for the others), then I'll be able
to use them.

I was on a project last year where I couldn't use sh functions (I've
used them since 1985, but they still aren't in the BSD sh) or awk
(some Xenix systems don't have awk, it seems), though I found it
interesting that the company I was working with felt that they could
assume that sendmail existed on all of the systems.

Certainly, if you're going to write software that works on a specific
set of systems that you can control the contents of, use perl, GNU
awk, and anything else you can get your hands on to do a better job.
Just remember that these things aren't universal.

-- 
David Elliott		dce at Solbourne.COM
			...!{boulder,nbires,sun}!stan!dce