Date: Thu, 29 Jul 1999 23:18:07 -0500 (CDT) From: David Scheidt <dscheidt@enteract.com> To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> Cc: Len Huppe <huppe@execpc.com>, Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai <asmodai@wxs.nl>, Dominic Mitchell <Dom.Mitchell@palmerharvey.co.uk>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Shell wars (was: What to tell to Linux-centric people?!') Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.3.96.990729231012.7681B-100000@shell-3.enteract.com> In-Reply-To: <19990730125307.X93194@freebie.lemis.com>
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On Fri, 30 Jul 1999, Greg Lehey wrote: > On Thursday, 29 July 1999 at 22:09:25 -0500, Len Huppe wrote: > >> * Greg Lehey (grog@lemis.com) [990728 10:20]: > > and it has more functionality than I'll ever use. As far as its > > capabilities as a programming language, I would much rather use Perl > > for that. If I write all of my user-land scripts in Perl, it won't > > matter which shell each user prefers. > > > > any rebuttals? I find there is a point at which writing a shell script is easier than writing the same thing in perl. My scripts start as shell, with bits of awk and sed, and as they get more complex, I tend to rewrite them in perl. For less than 100 lines or so, shell wins for lots of stuff. > I've found this discussion interesting enough that I've made the > switch from bash to zsh, which doesn't have one of the more irritating > bugs in bash: when working in a Microsoft file system with these > brain-dead directory names with embedded blanks, bash goes completely > crazy, while zsh is fine. I've got zsh configured (which takes far > too long, btw. The port maintainer should add some .zsh* files with > typical configs) to the point where it can replace bash, and I'll > learn the finer points as time goes on. The difficulty of changing tools is one of things that annoys me about the UNIX world. I've a friend that keeps badgering me to use mutt over pine. I have looked at it, and tried it a couple of times. But the learning curve is too great. There are any number of things I am told it does better than pine, but I can't do them in my sleep, so it doesn't matter. Lack of decent docs makes it even harder. A man page that tells me to go look at a web page is almost as bad as no man page at. In many ways, it is worse. Of course, outside of the UNIX world, one of the reasons that it is easy to change tools is that none of them do anything useful. David Scheidt To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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