>>To start with if you open a DOS console or term in front of them and say "you are going to be typing things in here", you will have already lost 90% of them. It's a hard fact (especially for those of us who love the cli as much as I) but rather inescapable. So what are you going to do about that?<<

Maybe you could start by writing a small script which teaches maybe three simple text functions and concepts. Finding a specific line/word (how to use find), searching for similar words (simple regexp), and then maybe printing the results to a file. Or something else which is more useful for you.

Maybe your perl script could run on a web page and you could take user input for the functions, and vet the responses. You could decide whether you would actually want to run the user inputted code or not... could increase interactivity (and the work for you).

Such a script would be some work to write, but perhaps requires more thought than complex coding.

I agree with that when you start by making the tools too cumbersome, you lose your students even before you can show them anything useful. When I learned programming (back in 5th grade!) the teacher set up our Basic interface for us... but the concepts still stuck. Convey the utility, hopefully all else will follow. Probably the lesson won't stick for everyone, but maybe some people will be willing to dig around a bit more, and then you can come back and wonder what to do next.

(Funny, we were just having a conversation about teaching perl over in the meditations section. But I haven't figured out how to link to that node yet... ;| sorry, newbie.)