One job I had many years ago was writing a standard installer for a Unix app written in C. I used shell. But it had to run on AIX, ICL Unix, DEC Unix, Sys V SCO OpenUnix and BSD. Very little standardisation across shells on those platforms, nightmare to work around the quirks of different machines.

Let me give another example of shell suckiness. Write a script to run FTP, check the output and if it fails do some rollback action. Perl, easy (Net::FTP). Shell, you run, grep and pray. Again, different platforms, different ftp command line syntax... Linux, Solaris, argh.

Regards, Peter
http://perl.dragonstaff.co.uk

--
peterdragon

In reply to Re^2: Unix shell versus Perl by peterdragon
in thread Unix shell versus Perl by eyepopslikeamosquito

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