perl

[Chris Anderson]

In article <18498 at well.sf.ca.us> gregs at well.sf.ca.us (Greg Strockbine) writes:
>I'm just starting to look at perl. Is there a good reason
>to use it instead of sed, awk, etc.?

Absolutely!  It does much more for you than any of the other standard
utilities.  Anything you can do in them, you can do in perl... usually
faster and more portably.  It's regular expression handling is better
than that supplied with egrep or sed, it is much more efficient than
anything that I've used before for text manipulation, and you can use
it with binary files as well.

I use it a lot for systems administration duties, since the scripts 
will run without change on multiple machines (be careful, though,
perl includes functions for dealing with sockets, symbolic links, and
file locking if you compile it on a BSD machine; AT&T doesn't have those
features yet).  But you can test at runtime for missing features, so
you can still write fairly portable scripts using those functions.

Read comp.lang.perl for awhile, and don't be scared off by the syntax.

Chris


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| Chris Anderson  						       |
| QMA, Inc.		        email : {csusac,sactoh0}!utgard!chris  |
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