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

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 
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).

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com