Beefy Boxes and Bandwidth Generously Provided by pair Networks
P is for Practical
 
PerlMonks  

Re^2: Unix shell versus Perl

by peterdragon (Beadle)
on Feb 19, 2008 at 23:30 UTC ( [id://668909]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


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

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^3: Unix shell versus Perl
by JavaFan (Canon) on Aug 05, 2008 at 13:29 UTC
    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.

Log In?
Username:
Password:

What's my password?
Create A New User
Domain Nodelet?
Node Status?
node history
Node Type: note [id://668909]
help
Chatterbox?
and the web crawler heard nothing...

How do I use this?Last hourOther CB clients
Other Users?
Others romping around the Monastery: (3)
As of 2024-11-08 18:58 GMT
Sections?
Information?
Find Nodes?
Leftovers?
    Voting Booth?
    chatterbot is...






    Results (33 votes). Check out past polls.