scripting fun

[Smoot Carl-Mitchell]

On Fri, 2008-06-06 at 16:35 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:

> Perl must be getting close and it can do the same trick of throwing 
> everything into hashes to weed out duplicates and quickly check for 
> existence.

I do that all the time in Perl. Hashes are extremely useful.
> 
> But we have always had a large assortment of program tools at the shells 
> disposal, so if the job maps into the things those do well (sort -u/comm 
> -13 in this case) you are all set. And if you use a higher level 
> language you are likely to waste a lot of time re-inventing sorts and 
> comparisons that were done right decades ago.

I have done a lot a shell programming, but I have to admit that Perl
makes doing doing some things a lot easier. Procedural languages with a
good set of primitives have advantages over the standard Unix shells.
Both are useful tools and both have their place in any programming
toolkit.
-- 
Smoot Carl-Mitchell
System/Network Architect
smoot at tic.com
+1 480 922 7313
cell: +1 602 421 9005