If pressed for a number of lines, I'd say about 25, give or take 15 lines. Perl offers far more structure and error handling than pretty much any everyday shell. Perl also tends to be more legible if written in common styles and using common idioms than shell does.

The real reasons I'd rewrite aren't quite as straightforward as a number of lines, though. If your shell script is just a driver for a bunch of other programs which run pretty much in order with fairly static sets of command-line options, then it can be fairly long without being an issue at all. If, however, it is less of a scriptable harness and more of an application in its own right, then it probably should have been written in a proper general purpose programming language in the first place.

In reply to Re: At what point do you rewrite that old shell script in Perl? by mr_mischief
in thread At what point do you rewrite that old shell script in Perl? by rudder

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