Re: At what point do you rewrite that old shell script in Perl?

[dragonchild]

Rewriting anything that currently works is dangerous and should only be undertaken when the product in question cannot be extended to a specific enhancement need without an inordinate amount of unsafe practices. This goes for any piece of code, period.

[jhourcle]

I'll add -- or you have to port it to another environment, and it has dependancies that you can't rely on.

Eg, if I'm going to have to move from a BSD to an ATT unix, and do something with parsing ps output, and suddenly have to deal with the difference in options between systems. (it's one thing to move it completely, but I don't want to maintain two variants if I don't have to.

[rudder]

Well, that said, things aren't so clear cut. Often, existing scripts limp along with tolerable inadequacies. And maybe they already use unsafe practices, but those transgressions have been overlooked since the scripts work most of the time, and when they don't, it's not too much work to clean up messes and run the script again.

Thanks for your answer though. As I read it, the answer is: you've got to use your judgement and consider how hard it will be to add further enhancements and how unsafe the current script is.