Hello, > of course you're right that Bourne shell has been around for decades, i > guess i wasn't thinking about that one since i really don't know anyone > who uses that as their primary login shell.
For quite some time, I used tcsh as login shell and Bourne for scripts... > perhaps it's because i've programmed in C for a bit and i have a good > memory, but i didn't think that learning perl was so tough. Actually, I've had the same experience! It's like C, but if you need a couple of lines of sed or awk, just bung them in - no pipes, children, zombies or whatever. > especially with that great O'Reilly book as a guide. I was learning just from the manpages... > > Of course, for big programs one should use perl. > > I read a rule somewhere: "If the program is the size of a Makefile, > > write the program in a shell; for larger programs, write it in perl." Then again, even for small programs, you are likely to write a better program if you have a better tool. (For example, you'll probably put in more error-checking if you can say `/^valid input line$/ or die'.) Jiri <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>