Perl or Shell programming?

[ssmith73]

Hi All,
I wonder what people opinions are regarding the effort required to learn shell programming (i use bash), versus Perl. I write verilog code for a living so do lots of things with text files. I would assume that Perl is the more difficult to learn, but it has more features. I am relatively familiar with a few different languages, but i wouldn't say particularly proficient in any of them. I know enough to hack most source code to do what i want it to. I am probably leaning towards perl, thinking that it will be more useful to know away from the shell - but i would like peoples opinions on this.

Cheers,

Sean

[danbuter]

I think Perl would overall be more useful, but if you are only doing small stuff in Linux, then Shell Scripting should be fine. I am no expert on either, just played around with them, so take this with a grain of salt.

[Thrillhouse]

I don't think Perl would be as hard to learn as you think it is, especially if you have experience with other languages. In fact, this website has a very easy-to-learn set of tutorials that will teach you Perl from scratch. The first one is located here. I would go with Perl just because it's a little bit more flexible. There are modules built for it that allow you to do just about anything you want. Bash is invaluable, especially in a Linux environment but it's confined mostly to system administration tasks. Perl can encompass a wider range of jobs.

[Lakshmipathi]

i vote for perl.......i know shell programming...but i guess perl will be much more useful ...so first try perl and then learn shell too....because shell script is very powerful one

[ghostdog74]

IMO, learn to use the shell. The shell is so powerful and abundance with ready installed tools. try to get to know them...at least before you embark on other language tools...

[drl]

Hi.

At the training center where I worked, we showed the students that shell programming was relatively easy during the Intro to *nix courses.

The next course, Intermediate *nix and Shell Programming, concentrated on the scripting and regular expressions.

We then recommended the perl courses if students needed to process large text files, or to do a lot of system administration work, especially in a networked environment.

We required some programming experience for perl, but not for shell.

"Why should you learn shell programming? Because often,
medium-sized to large problems can be decomposed into smaller
pieces, each of which is amenable to being solved with one of the
Unix tools. A shell script, when done well, can often solve a
problem in a mere fraction of the time it would take to solve the
same problem using a conventional language such as C or C++. It
is also possible to make shell scripts portable -- i.e. usable
across a range of Unix and POSIX-compliant systems, with little
or no modification."

Classic Shell Programming, Robbins & Beebe, O'Reilly, 2005

Best wishes ... cheers, drl