Re: Shell or Perl for system administration

From: Chris F.A. Johnson (cfajohnson_at_gmail.com)
Date: 08/26/05 

Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2005 16:43:17 -0400

On 2005-08-26, Johnny Rotten wrote:
> I picked up Classic Shell Scripting (O'reilly 2005) and Learning Perl
> Third Edition (O'reilly 2001) but 'am unsure which to start with. I
> ordered a new computer with FreeBSD preinstalled (which hopefully will
> arrive soon) and want to learn UNIX system administration. Programming
> is obviously neccesary to automate tasks and customize the system to my
> needs, though I am unsure which language to start with.
>
> The only experience I have with UNIX based operating systems is using my
> shell account at school. Meaning beyond mail, basic shell commands
> (pipes, editing config files, changing file permissions) I know nothing
> about UNIX or programming.

    You will need to know some shell scripting whether you learn Perl
    or not. (You already have some experience with it.)

    You may or may not need to learn Perl for general-purpose
    programming. I don't. If a shell script cannot do it (and there's
    very little it cannot), I use C.

    Knowledge of awk and sed is part of shell scripting, and those
    languages are essential for dealing with large files. 

-- 
    Chris F.A. Johnson                     <http://cfaj.freeshell.org>
    ==================================================================
    Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach, 2005, Apress
    <http://www.torfree.net/~chris/books/cfaj/ssr.html>

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