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.

In reply to Re^3: Unix shell versus Perl by JavaFan
in thread Unix shell versus Perl by eyepopslikeamosquito

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.