re: awk, perl

[thutmose]

Hey,


Guys I have a question. Which one is more difficult to learn; AWK or perl.

 

[grega]

I would probably say Perl, because it's a programming language in it's own right, and therefore there's a lot more to it.

Greg.

 

[MikeLacey]

Hmm - I would actually say Perl is easier to learn. I guess it depends upon how the structure of a language "fits" with the way you approach problems.

There's certainly more support for Perl, in terms of books and support forums. The General Unix forum here is a lot less busy than the Perl forum. Mike
michael.j.lacey@ntlworld.com
Email welcome if you're in a hurry or something -- but post in tek-tips as well please, and I will post my reply here as well.

 

[pcunix]

To become proficient with either is probably close to the same effort, but you can definitely get more done with Perl for any level of investment against the same time spent on awk.

IOW, if you spendt a week learning awk and a week learning Perl, I think you could do more things with your Perl knowledge than you could with awk.

See

http://pcunix.com/Unixart/loveperl.html

Tony Lawrence
SCO Unix/Linux Resources

http://pcunix.com

tony@pcunix.com

 

[guitarguy]

I learned perl about 5 years ago and after spending nearly a year on awk/ksh stuff, learning perl was a blessing. I had one complex awk/shell script that took 8 redirects (cut, sort..etc) and 3 minutes, the same thing in perl took 16 seconds and almost no noticably load on the cpu. Perl is much faster and more efficient.

For what it's worth two best books i've bought was "The Perl CD bookshelf" and "Perl Black Book".

 

[MikeLacey]

Yep, I remember the same sorts of benefit when I first started using Perl. On the system I was using at the time (386 based Sequent SMP running Dynix/3 in dinosaour mode) the difference was *very* noticeable... Mike
michael.j.lacey@ntlworld.com
Email welcome if you're in a hurry or something -- but post in tek-tips as well please, and I will post my reply here as well.