Hmmm, that type of comparison does not really make sense to me.

If I want to find all the lines that contains the letters "ab" in a file, using shell script, I can just write:

grep ab file.txt

If I want to do that in a Perl one-liner, there is just no way I can do that in just 8 characters plus the name of the file. Just the "perl -e " sequence has 8 characters, and I haven't even started to give the code of my Perl script. The script could be as short as something like this:

perl -ne 'print if /ab/' file.txt

(Maybe someone will find some way of doing it shorter, but that's not the point.)

There is just no way a Perl program could be as simple (as concise, as short) as a simple shell command, but it makes no sense to compare them. A shell command may contain hundreds or thousands of code source lines. If you go this way, I could also include all the code that I want or need in an x.pl file and then say that:

grep ab file.txt can be replaced by the following: x.pl

which shows that Perl is far more concise than the shell or almost pretty anything else.

I should add that I don't know many languages where something like this:

perl -ne 'print if /ab/' file.txt

can be coded so concisely (or course, sed and awk could do that, but we are again comparing things that are not really comparable).

In reply to Re^3: File::Find seems grossly inefficient for performing simple file tasks by Laurent_R
in thread File::Find seems grossly inefficient for performing simple file tasks by taint

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