Advise: Programming Language to Learn

[Alex Beamish]

On 4/9/07, Stephen <stephen-d-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>
> I often need to do utility programs to, for example, extract email
> addresses from a text file.


That's the kind of thing that awk, sed and Perl are very good at.

I used to use OS/2 REXX and it was great and fast.


REXX is a lot like shell programming .. while it's possibly to do lots of
cool things with shell, it's not extensible and tough to debug.

What would be a good choice to use on my Linux system?


Depending on how complicated the scripts are going to get, it's a toss-up
between awk, sed and Perl. I haven't used sed much, but it's very good at
grabbing stuff and displaying what you want. awk is a little more involved,
but works very well. Perl might be overkill for just searching through a
file for E-Mail addresses, but you can use it in so many other areas of
Systems Administration and Software Development.

I know Pascal well, C fair and PHP pretty well.


I would stay away from the compiled languages unless run-time speed is
paramount. I don't know PHP well enough to comment on how well it might
extract E-Mail addresses from a file, but I'm guessing that sed or awk would
be a better choice.

-- 
Alex Beamish
Toronto, Ontario
aka talexb
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