Re: Scripting question, [small programming question

From: Matthew Miller (mattdm_at_mattdm.org)
Date: 05/25/05

  • Next message: Rahul Sundaram: "Re: Scripting question, [small programming question" 
    Date: Wed, 25 May 2005 09:33:31 -0400
To: For users of Fedora Core releases <fedora-list@redhat.com>

    On Wed, May 25, 2005 at 08:11:14AM -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
    > However, back when these concepts were being developed, it was pretty
    > easy to read *all* the unix man pages and understand which tool should
    > be used for which job. Before X was included, the entire manual set for
    > a unix system fit in 3 fairly small books. Now, with all the X programs
    > and development tools included, finding the old simple utilities would
    > be a much harder job even though they still work as well as ever.

    One suggestion is to do "rpm -ql coreutils" and skim through the man page of
    each of those utilies.

    Then, for slightly more advanced (and often linux-specific) utilities, look
    at "rpm -ql util-linux".

    This won't cover everything (notably important stand-alone programs like awk
    and sed), but would give a pretty good base.

    > Before you start something really complicated in a shell script, though,
    > you should think through whether it would be better in a more
    > comprehensive language like perl. In shell, you have extra overhead
    > of starting other programs for each operation. This is done very
    > efficiently but still is extra work compared to built-in operations, and
    > there are some operations like working with sockets that are included
    > in perl but not sh.

    I think a good rule of thumb is that if your shell script doesn't fit on a
    single 80x25 screen, it's maybe time to consder a more powerful scripting
    language. 

    -- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm@mattdm.org        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>                <http://linux.bu.edu/>
Current office temperature: 73 degrees Fahrenheit.
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  • Next message: Rahul Sundaram: "Re: Scripting question, [small programming question"

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