Re: Unix shell versus Perl

Aside from the fact that there is, undeniably, only perl for scripting on Windoze machines (if that isn't a contradiction in terms), one thing that, for *NIX machines, hasn't, AFAICT, yet been mentioned is that perl is installed other than on the root partition - thus any system scripts requiring the availability of perl (and the necessary parts of its' myriad of wonderful library modules) cannot start until the appropriate partition(s) has/have been checked and mounted ... but to get to that point perl must be available... mmmm, bit of a circular dependency thingy goin' on here methinx.

IMO, this is a classic case of horses for courses - shell script is marvellous (C shell excepted of course - Tom Christianson. http://www.perl.com/pub/language/versus/csh.html) for *NIX systems programming - for all else, perl is, by far & away, the front runner.

Just my 10 p'worth...

At last, a user level that overstates my experience :-))

Comment on Re: Unix shell versus Perl

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Re^2: Unix shell versus Perl by JavaFan (Canon) on Aug 05, 2008 at 13:46 UTC
Well, that quite depends on the setup. Many Linux distros use one big partition by default anyway (or at least have /usr on the root mount), so once you have anything, you have perl (assuming it's in /usr/bin/perl). And traditionally, the root mount contained /bin with just a small set of programs, just enough to get to the stage to mount other file systems. Anything interesting would be in /usr/bin anyway. Furthermore, mounting other file systems happens pretty early in the boot process anyway - so most rc scripts will have perl available, even if perl is not on the root mount. But I've also worked for a company where we used Linux boxes that only had 2 Mb of memory, 25 Mb disks, and for which the OS had to be installable from a single floppy disk. Needless to say, said boxes didn't have Perl, although I used Perl a lot to create the distros.	[reply]
Re^3: Unix shell versus Perl by Bloodnok (Vicar) on Aug 05, 2008 at 14:49 UTC
...there's an awful lot "goes on" after getting to single user run level...i.e. before the rest of the file systems are checked & mounted. A user level that continues to overstate my experience :-))	[reply]