On Wed, May 25, 2005 at 08:11:14AM -0500, Les Mikesell wrote: > However, back when these concepts were being developed, it was pretty > easy to read *all* the unix man pages and understand which tool should > be used for which job. Before X was included, the entire manual set for > a unix system fit in 3 fairly small books. Now, with all the X programs > and development tools included, finding the old simple utilities would > be a much harder job even though they still work as well as ever. One suggestion is to do "rpm -ql coreutils" and skim through the man page of each of those utilies. Then, for slightly more advanced (and often linux-specific) utilities, look at "rpm -ql util-linux". This won't cover everything (notably important stand-alone programs like awk and sed), but would give a pretty good base. > Before you start something really complicated in a shell script, though, > you should think through whether it would be better in a more > comprehensive language like perl. In shell, you have extra overhead > of starting other programs for each operation. This is done very > efficiently but still is extra work compared to built-in operations, and > there are some operations like working with sockets that are included > in perl but not sh. I think a good rule of thumb is that if your shell script doesn't fit on a single 80x25 screen, it's maybe time to consder a more powerful scripting language. -- Matthew Miller mattdm@xxxxxxxxxx <http://www.mattdm.org/> Boston University Linux ------> <http://linux.bu.edu/> Current office temperature: 73 degrees Fahrenheit.
