On 9/17/2010 10:02 AM, Robert P. J. Day 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.
> :-)
Yes, at least get across the concept that anything they do on the
command line can be saved in a file and run again - and any command that
needs to be repeated with small differences can be easily wrapped in a
'for' loop with a list of substitutions. And if the course doesn't
already cover it, point out the ability to ^r recall previous commands
and repeat with simple edits.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com