in reply to Myth busted: Shell isn't always faster than Perl

Put your own inability to develop quality shell script as a defect of the shell, do it, clever plan.
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Re^2: Myth busted: Shell isn't always faster than Perl
by zentara (Cardinal) on Dec 31, 2005 at 12:13 UTC
    Well that speaks to the point I'm making. The people who suggested the original slow shell script, are well respected and talented shell programmers. And my "run-of-the-mill" Perl script, beat it. So when someone says, "why use Perl, I can do it faster with a shell script", you better think twice; because maybe the Perl is faster.

    Also the optimized shell script only beat the Perl version by a nose, Considering how much more flexible the Perl script is, in processing the files as they are found, run-of-the-mill Perl is likely to be faster, than a run-of-the-mill shell, doing some equivalent task. Shell, with it's constant spawing of awk and sed, etc.; is probably harder to do at optimized speed, compared to Perl.


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