[CentOS] looking for cool, post-install things to do on a centos 5.5 system

[Les Mikesell]

On 9/17/2010 10:12 AM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
> Les Mikesell wrote:
>> On 9/17/2010 8:24 AM, m.roth at 5-cent.us 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
>
> So, what's the longest awk scripts you've ever written, Mike? It works
> wonderfully well for what it was intended - and mostly, I use it for
> reports or data conversion.

Don't think I've ever written one from scratch, at least not since perl 
was around because it was too painful to debug.  I agree that it works 
fine when you copy someone else's already-debugged code.  I'm not 
recommending never using awk, I just don't see the point of learning to 
write it.

>> 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).
>
> Misuse of awk.
>
>           mark "why, yes, I *have* written 100 and 200 line awk scripts to
>                  do data converstion and data validation"

But why, when very likely better versions of whatever you were doing 
have already been written and debugged as CPAN perl modules?  Would you 
do something like time parsing or format conversions in awk, or extract 
mime attachment from a mail message?  Those sound simple but aren't and 
in perl you only have to write a couple of lines yourself to do them.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com