On Tue, Jan 06, 2009, Spiro Harvey wrote:
>> Why not just start with perl which does more than sed/awk while using
>> similar syntax (if you want)?
>
>This is why:
>
>awk '/^[[:space:]]*word/ {print}' logfile
>
>vs
>
>perl -ne 'if (/^\s*word/) { print $_; }' logfile
>
>Which syntax is likely to be easier to remember?
It depends entirely on what you want to do. For on-liners, sed, awk, and
grep, and pcregrep (grep using perl regular expression syntax which is
considerably more concise than [:space:] and friends) are often the best
tools. For anything more complex, scripting languages such as python and
perl are generally more flexible and easier to use.
I used to some pretty complex shell and awk scripts before learning perl
about 20 years ago. Perl allowed me to do most things in a single language
including fairly low-level system calls that I previously had to do with
compiled ``C'' programs.
I have switched all of my new development primarily to python which I find
far cleaner than perl, and easier to use for large projects. Python uses
perl regular expression syntax so the transition was pretty painless.
Bill
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