what do you advise dudes? start to learn perl or shell programming?

Quite depends m8 :)

What are you planning on doing with it?

For simple, repetitive tasks shell is fine,
for text manipulation of ANY kind Perl is
purrfact :) ... if speed is an issue, try C ;)


Cheers,
Tink

how about both ? they can both come in handy.

i recommend perl. In my opinion its a little better documented then shell scripting and its much easier to use (again my 2 cents). Plus, you can do ALOT with perl that i don't think you can do with shell, like sockets ect.

i'd learn perl too. it's generally more powerful than simple shell scripting, not to mention easier to understand (IMHO). plus if you're doing anything that requires string manipulation, then nothing can touch perl.. not even C or PHP.

when writing shell scripts i like to use perl just because it gives me the option to expand the script past the capacity of shell scripting in bash or sh.

I try to be a programmer, but I'm just ans undergraduate lawyer...

I think shell is better at first, because you don't need (for now) to worry about open, read files as in Perl. Just do a redirection and you're fine.

In the other hand, Perl is a f***ing great language. Start with shell, switch to Perl and learn some Python and Tcl/Tk in the meantime... This is what I did... :-)

Sometimes you'll see things easier to do in shell, sometimes it's easier to do in Perl / Python / Tcl.

If you think about portability, choose a scripting language, cause are significant differences between shells (sh x bash x csh x zsh x ksh and so forth).

HTH,

vfs.

> i'd learn perl too. it's generally more powerful than simple shell scripting, not to mention
> easier to understand (IMHO). plus if you're doing anything that requires string manipulation,
> then nothing can touch perl.. not even C or PHP.
*cough*

What do you think perl is written in? :P
Lexx, Yacc and Perl? ;)

And you can do regex either using POSIX standard libraries or one the various regex libraries ;)
in C quite easily ... if you don't mind compiling stuff I see no reason why to use Perl here :)


Cheers,
Tink

yah, but thats nasty and hard to do. plus, its not very forgiving. In perl, its a lot easier to notice and track down mistakes.
plus, perl is EASY

> yah, but thats nasty and hard to do. plus, its not very forgiving. In perl,
> its a lot easier to notice and track down mistakes.
> plus, perl is EASY
heh ... I agree ... scripting languages encourage a
try & error approach towards programming ;)

If you haven't learnt any other programming lingo beforehand
Perl isn't easier than C or Pascal ... it's just 'different'.

Cheers,
Tink