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

[nic]

Certainly my approach to shell scripting is that anything that starts going over about 20 
lines gets turned in to a Python script.

As for your other point about whether sed and awk are needed for a server install, I think 
that almost invariably they are required, because start scripts and utilities often need 
them, probably for just the sort of thing you;re talking about (because the scripts were 
written before Python was widely used...

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?
>  
> Anthony
> 
> 
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> 
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