On Fri, 17 Sep 2010, 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 > 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). i will probably throw in an hour or so of shell scripting, just enough to whet their appetites and make them want an actual course. :-) rday -- ======================================================================== Robert P. J. Day Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA Top-notch, inexpensive online Linux/OSS/kernel courses http://crashcourse.ca Twitter: http://twitter.com/rpjday LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday ========================================================================