Re^2: Unix shell versus Perl

[peterdragon]

in reply to Re: Unix shell versus Perl
in thread Unix shell versus Perl

One job I had many years ago was writing a standard installer for a Unix app written in C. I used shell. But it had to run on AIX, ICL Unix, DEC Unix, Sys V SCO OpenUnix and BSD. Very little standardisation across shells on those platforms, nightmare to work around the quirks of different machines.

Let me give another example of shell suckiness. Write a script to run FTP, check the output and if it fails do some rollback action. Perl, easy (Net::FTP). Shell, you run, grep and pray. Again, different platforms, different ftp command line syntax... Linux, Solaris, argh.

Regards, Peter
http://perl.dragonstaff.co.uk

[JavaFan]

My experiences are different. I once rewrote from scratch an installer/upgrader for the product the company I worked for produced. The result, a 2.5k shell/awk program, using isql (Sybase command line tool) to do its interaction with the database. Initially developed on Solaris, but I knew it had to run on HP-UX and Windows NT as well. The porting took less than 30 minutes - I was using an option to grep HP-UX didn't know about, and Windows NT (which had a Unix toolkit installed) didn't know about /tmp.

Later, I've used shell scripts initially developped on Linux without much problems under Windows/cygwin.

Of course, you may say, Windows doesn't come with a Unix toolkit. You are right of course. But Windows doesn't come with Perl either, so whether you want to use Perl or shell to do your cross-platform scripting, you will have to install something.

Why I didn't write the installer I mentioned in the first paragraph in Perl, you may ask. Well, at that time, Solaris didn't come with perl, so we couldn't assume perl was available. And I hadn't convinced the company I worked for that we should just bundle perl with our product. Yet. A year later, I had to write a different installer. By then, we did bundle perl with our product, and that one was written in Perl. By the time, we had dropped Windows as a platform so I don't know whether it would have worked on Windows.