Re: Why Perl?

[ww]

Minor amendments -- don't turn off the cow-orkers who might have other preconceptions:

1. Because it's often usually installed by default on nix-ish boxen.
2. Because it's readily available on every platform (at least, those I've run into) virtually every significant platform newer than CP/M 86.
3. There are a lot of existing modules to tap into
4. There is a lot of expertise to draw upon (Perlmonks,some .edu tuts, other sites).
5. You don't need to do much to move Start moving from 'shell script' to 'perl script'...
6. It's really good for the types of task that you tend to do a lot of, when doing 'systems programming'. Running commands, capturing and parsing output.
7. ... But despite that it's a powerful enough language that you can go a lot further with ease. (OO programming, multithreading, to name a few.)
8. I get along with it better than the other languages I've worked with.

Or, to put it another way, it offers a good way to do almost anything other than washing windows and putting the toothpaste back in the tube.

:-)

[hippo]

Because it's often usually installed by default on nix-ish boxen.

OK, I'll bite. Go ahead and name any nix-ish distro released in the last decade that didn't/doesn't come with perl installed by default. :-)

[Preceptor]

No, I take that point - I work with some production systems that it's been necessary to really lock it down. For all the reasons Perl is a really handy scripting language, it's also a security risk. I do have to touch systems that are extremely locked down - I've just about won the war about why 'vi' is an acceptable risk. But compilers and interpreters are fabulous ways to leverage an exploit.

But in that scenario - the only scripting language that's available is shell.