May I add one HUGE advantage of learning Perl?
ONLINE DOCUMENTATION
sed and awk are great, for what they're created for. They're old and rusty, and don't allow more complex stuff to be written *and* maintained easily. (yes, they allow complex stuff, but don't try to maintain 400 line sed or awk scripts)
perl comes with the *complete* documentation online (source of the docs is 4.5 Mb!), in whatever form you prefer: man, pod, html, ... and had converters for the man pages and utilities to be even more efficient: forgot how sysseek works?
# perldoc -f sysseek
Forgot the options to start perl with?
# man perlrun
Want a tutorial about perl regular expressions?
# man perlretut
etc, etc. All of that not available for awk and sed.
I still use awk and sed, but once I want to glue, filter, join, combine, or distribute data(bases) I use perl. Perl also has CPAN: Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, an enourmous repository of plug-in modules that allow you to you perfect solutions from others and don't have you reinvent a wheel. Most wheels are already invented.
Perl also gives two scripts (a2p and s2p) that convert valid awk (a2p) and sed (s2p) to perl, so if you can read/maintain perl, and you do not understand a legacy piece of awk, just run it through a2p, read the perl code and understand what the awk script was supposed to do
For all three languages, I recommend to read Jeffrey Friedl's "Mastering Regular Expressions", which covers all available regular expressions currently used in the unix world: awk, sed, grep, perl, python, vi, emacs, java, .net, posix, ... (
http://regex.info/ )
Books:
awk:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/awkprog3/index.htmlawk & sed:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/sed2/index.htmlperl:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pperl3/regex:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/regex2/index.htmlEnjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn
Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn
