Anyone have any thoughts on shell programming languages of choice? I've recently been diving into perl.. (for shell only.. I would never use it for web.. ).. any thoughts? (You can see an article on my first Perl attempt at http://www.devnut.com.. it's the current featured article. Btw.. I know there's an error in the code.. (as per the error I recieved last night.. I messed up the virtualhost entry... I'll get it fixed once I get home.)

Thoughts (on shell programming.. not the article.. )..

Ryan

well perl is pretty good depending on what you want to do. It's pretty versatile and easy to learn. But you're still talking about a shell script here so there's only so much you can deal with. It makes it easy to do complicated tasks, and you can even set up cron jobs that run automatically if you need to. Again it's still a scripting language so it's going to be slower than something compiled if you want to do more low level stuff.

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"No more yankie my wankie. The Donger need food!"

More people are killed annually by donkeys than die in air crashes.

Yeah.. well all I want to use it for is simple sysadmin tasks. If you take a look at the article ( http://devnut.com/view.php?x=article&id=perl1 ).. it's extremely simple (my first of course.. hehe..) but saves 3-4 minutes of work by doing it all at once... (any language could do this.. I've just chosen Perl..) (Btw, the scripts purpose, for those that don't wanna read the article, is to simplify virtualhost/user creation (management coming soon)..

Wait and see Part two of the series.. (coming out in the next couple days..) I actually dive into subroutines and stuff.. supplying you with a much more complicated version of the same script

Ryan

The thing that scares me about Perl is that some of the code I've seen (Like the DeCSS conversion to Perl) looked like a big block of hexcode with punctuation randomly tossed about here and there. The code just didn't make any sense. I haven't looked at any since, so I'd be welcome if someone would prove me wrong here.

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"And knowing is half the battle!"

Take a look at the link above .. the code is extremely straightforward and simple..

Ryan

Well, I WOULD take a look at your article if your URL was working...

Wow...looks like DOS Batch processing meets C...interesting...I'll have to look into this some more.

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"And knowing is half the battle!"

Haha, pearl easy.....lmao. I don't know perl. But I know some students here at Maryland, who aced a course which requires you get every single character for output 100% correct in C++ (the course is known to fail well over 1/3 the class every time). While I'm straying from subject, they passed that course, and passed the course with Perl. The difference is that they hated pearl for large projects, because the syntax is deadly.

I actually prefer C versus C++ (call me crazy), and C has really terse styling and syntax. From what I've seen of Pearl, it can get REALLY nasty, really fast.

Okay, now that I've had my rant, let me conclude by saying I don't actually know perl, so i should probably be ignored

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paul@pleaseohpleasedontspamme.slcentral.com
A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems -- P. Erdos

The URL works if you get a little creative. It should read http://www.devnut.com without the extra periods.

Yeah, I noticed, but I forgot to put down that I had noticed. I read his article, hence my comments about the code. Besides, I even have him bookmarked.

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"And knowing is half the battle!"

I'll bet it doesn't suck as much as ASM. I'll be learning that again in the fall. Trouble is, as much as I hate ASM, I really need to be paying more attention to it for some little side projects I've had up my sleeve for ages...[/B][/QUOTE]

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"And knowing is half the battle!"

Yeah.. (that's a hella simple program though.. I mean, I made use of variables + the system() functions.. hardly programming. The next article is actually somewhat more worth reading.. I promise.. (sometime this weekend it will probably see the frontpage..

Ryan

I could definitely see what you're saying in terms of using it for large projects.. the code could get pretty ugly.. and somewhat unmanageable.. however for my uses it's perfect

Ryan

well it's not just the code that can get unmanageable, remember the language is interpreted. Large, complex perl code can really run slow. For small scripts it's definitely good, but that's pretty mcuh what it is designed to do. I don't think you'd want to develop an application in perl though, especially since anyone can just read your code and change it hehehe


Assembly is far far far worse than perl but then again it's much faster. I'm glad I'm not taking that course hehehe We did some MIPS assembly programming in my computer architectures class and i hated it.

btw, i got a little assembly question for ya... how do you swap 2 memory spaces without using any extra storage? My professor in operating systems class told us this as a side thing but my friend had it as a bonus on his Assembly class final hehehe good thing I mentioned it to him the night before... It was pretty cool too, I'm like oh yea you might want to know this little thing and it ended up saving his arse hehehe.

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SystemLogic.net - Editor

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"No more yankie my wankie. The Donger need food!"

More people are killed annually by donkeys than die in air crashes.

Umm...you mean without writing to any extra memory, or without using any registers to do it? And I'm sure whatever method of doing it probably just involves using the registers to move the data anyway. You could just move it a word at a time, holding the swap value in AX, the current position/offset of each location in BX and DX, and then use CX as a counter to go as long as you need it.

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"And knowing is half the battle!"

no I mean not using any extra registers or anything... so let's just say you have data in locations AX and BX... swap them without any extra storage.... come on, this is simple

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SystemLogic.net - Editor

2 Pentium III 1 Ghz 2 Alpha HeatSinks with 38 CFM Delta Fan | Abit VP6 | 512 MB PC-166 | Antec SX1030B with 4 High Output 80mm Sunon Fans | 2 30 GB IBm 75 Drives in RAID 0 | Plextor PlexWriter 16/10/40A | Mitsumi 40x CD-ROM | Generic 3.5" Floppy Drive | VisionTek Geforce 2 GTS 32 MB | Sound Blaster Live! Value | 3com NIC | Diamond Supra Modem | 19" Sony Monitor | Klipsch Promedia V.2-400 Speakers | PcMods.com Sound Sensitive Blue

"No more yankie my wankie. The Donger need food!"

More people are killed annually by donkeys than die in air crashes.