On 9/17/2010 10:02 AM, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
Proper scripting abilities are perhaps beyond reach for a short course, but you could at least show off some one-liners or those short, stunningly useful examples to help them get the idea that they definitely should get their feet wet on it sooner or later.
awk, awk! Perl's a day, minimum, by itself, but awk you can do in an hour or two, and have immediate results.
But awk is a dead end that can't do a lot of things by itself. And learning how to embed awk into other scripts is even more syntactically obscure than just using perl in the first place. Besides, perl's '-c' check and debug facilities make it much more usable to beginners than awk's propensity to find errors mid-run (and worse, mid-some-other-script because you had to embed it).
i will probably throw in an hour or so of shell scripting, just enough to whet their appetites and make them want an actual course. :-)
Yes, at least get across the concept that anything they do on the command line can be saved in a file and run again - and any command that needs to be repeated with small differences can be easily wrapped in a 'for' loop with a list of substitutions. And if the course doesn't already cover it, point out the ability to ^r recall previous commands and repeat with simple edits.