2. Introduction
1 There can be only one!
2 Why reinvent the wheel?
3 No more glue!
4 Vrooom!
3. There can be only one! (or, Portability)
Perl is more portable!
Different operating systems have different versions of the basic tools:
Is /bin/sh bash? dash? ...?
Does ‘xargs -r’ work?
Does ‘find’ assume ‘.’? Does it have the printf formats you need?
Does ‘sed -i‘ work?
Must options always come first?
4. Why reinvent the wheel? (or, Work intelligently)
Use other people’s work
Extensive documentation with great examples.
CPAN is huge!
Cookbooks!
5. No more glue!
Getting tired of typing long lines?
If you’re going to write a script, use a portable and powerful language.
And don’t depend on external commands that may not work the same
between platforms, breaking your scripts.
6. Vrooom! (or, It’s fast)
Perl is faster
Ignoring start overhead, the same algorithms will be faster in Perl than in a
combination of shell, sed, awk and other things.
Don’t torture yourself
A proper programming language, with associative arrays, most of POSIX
functions, and a extensive library.
