[prog] re the perl course

[Rasjid Wilcox]

On Sat, 8 Feb 2003 5:43 am, Akkana wrote:
> [Why learn perl if you already know python?] I know it was mostly a
> joke, but I thought I'd add a comment that I just this week encountered
> another machine at work where I needed to write a script and discovered
> python wasn't installed.  Lots of machines (especially big servers
> shared by lots of people) still don't have python installed, though in a
> few years I expect it will be much more common.  But these days just
> about everyone installs perl.

<puts on serious hat>
I put off learning Perl for a couple of years simply because I didn't like the 
*look* of it.  Admittedly, most of the Perl code I saw were code samples 
floating across my local LUG email list when someone had problems getting 
something to work, or were just a quick solutions to a 'bash like' problem.

Now that I know (a little) Perl, I will never (well, almost never) write a 
bash script again.  Perl is 1000 times better than writing a complicated bash 
scipt.  Perl is an excelent sysadmin language (which is basically its roots 
and is still its forte, although it has become much more than that now), and 
is well worth learning just for that reason.  This is likely the reason that 
it is installed everywhere - every sysadmin wants it (or at least tools that 
depend on it), and so it is installed.

As an exercise in time wasting, I wrote two scripts for finding files of a 
given uid, and changing it to something else, one in Perl, the other in 
Python.  If people are interested, I can post them both to the list and even 
discuss some of the differences if requested.  Each script is about 30 lines.  
(Is there a convention about whether to post inline, give as attachements or 
provide a url?)

Cheers,

Rasjid.

-- 
Rasjid Wilcox
Canberra, Australia (UTC +11 hrs)
http://www.openminddev.net