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

Fri Sep 17 15:12:26 UTC 2010
m.roth at 5-cent.us <m.roth at 5-cent.us>

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.

> 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"