Scripting question, [small programming question

[Matthew Miller]

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 at mattdm.org        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>                <http://linux.bu.edu/>
Current office temperature: 73 degrees Fahrenheit.