[wellylug] Help in finding a good technical/Linux related bookstore

[Cliff Pratt]

Anthony Walters wrote:
> On 13/06/07, *nic* <nic at tymar.com <mailto:nic at tymar.com>> wrote:
> 
>     Do you have some specific application where you feel detailed
>     knowledge of awk and sed is
>     necessary?
> 
>  
> The one area which i would use sed or awk would be in the case of a 
> server install, i take the approach of only installing software that is 
> needed for the server to operate, so scripting languages would fall into 
> a question mark category for installation....
> 
>     At risk of starting a flame war, I'd suggest that the time for
>     needing a lot of detailed
>     knowledge of things like awk and sed has passed, and that if you
>     need to do anything
>     remotely complex, then it's almost certainly easier and quicker to
>     do in Python. I don't
>     know enough to say whether Ruby is good for the scripting area, but
>     if so, then that could
>     be a contender too.
> 
>  
> The other reason that i wanted to learn sed and awk is because i wanted 
> to get into some serious shell scripting. I was under the impression 
> that for shell scripting, sed, awk and regular expressions were 'need to 
> knows' for a shell script writing. But perhaps a basic understanding of 
> sed and awk is all that is needed, and the use of perl or python would 
> be better for the more complex processing?
>  
Why 'get into serious shell scripting'? Anything over a hundred lines 
should not IMO be written in shell code. It won't be portable, and it 
will be a pain to maintain. Oh well. I'm just about to hack into an 800 
- 900 line monster!

Basic understanding of sed and awk may be useful (I've not had to bother 
with awk in many years in the business) but in depth knowledge is not 
essential.

You'd do better (IMO) to concentrate on your favourite programming 
language (be it Perl or one of those other ones), and just picking up 
the shell and awk stuff that you need to understand other people's 
scripts that you need to maintain.

Cheers,

Cliff