The interesting and rewarding parts of shell to Perl conversion (for me) are mostly taking the multiple (and often unnecessary) calls to external programs and replacing them with fast Perl constructs.

Here you are suggesting that using a shell and calling other program is necessary (much) slower than doing it all in Perl. I beg to differ. Sure, if all your program is doing is calling a different program hundreds of time, and each time it just takes a fraction of a second to run, the shell loses because of the forking overhead.

But any Perl program starts with a backstart - the start up time of a Perl program is larger than of a shell script. And the shell typically calls utilities that have been written in C, and have been optimized for decades. Your systems' 'grep' and 'sort' will typically be much faster that the Perl equivalents - the Perl equivalents pay the price of being more powerfull, and having to deal with Perl variables.

In reply to Re: RFC: UNIX shell to Perl converter by Anonymous Monk
in thread RFC: UNIX shell to Perl converter by cdarke

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