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