Unix Shell Scripts

A weekend between giving courses, thankfully back to talking Perl next week.
I have been teaching our Korn shell course this week and I enjoyed it, but....
Why do so many people think that Korn shell and Bash are the same?
Bash is hugely more powerful than ksh, with Extended Regular Expressions in version 3, and possibly associative arrays soon (looking at the source, it seems most of the code is already there). There are still things missing, for example ERE matching is supported, so wouldn't a substition statement be a small further step?
Yes I know, danger of feature bloat. With a little more work Bash could be the new Perl 5 ;-) There might actually be a place for that once (if) Perl 6 takes hold (double smiley).

Funny how conventional programmers tend to look down on shell scripting. And funny how system administrators, and their ilk, are expected to write scripts with no training on good programming techniques and practice. Companies spend huge amounts making sure their applications are fast and efficient, then some poor erk runs a badly written script and screws the entire system. Is it the erk's fault? Maybe, but more likely the person who put them in that position.

Here is my contention: anyone can write a shell script, but it takes skill and knowledge to write a good one.

I recommend: Classic Shell Scripting by Robbins and Beebe (O'Reilly) May 2005. The best book on the subject I have come across.

Redemption

Microsoft, good ol' Microsoft, have a bunch of (useful) Perl scripts on:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/scripts/perl/prlindex.mspx
They only use Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), and they are a bit thin of explaination of the code, but it's a start. One day, maybe, I will get to write my "Perl Programming for Microsoft Windows" course.

Bye bye IE, hello Firefox

After downloading ActiveState Perl 5.8.7 I had problems displaying the html Perl documentation. Turns out (http://bugs.activestate.com/show_bug.cgi?id=39240) that the Internet Explorer patches with XP SP2 "locks-down" some features, like actually displaying web pages. Sorry, what did you say a browser is for?

I'm all for security, but preventing access to web pages on the local machine, even when it is not connected to the web? Give me a break!

So, hello Firefox! I used it months ago, but never got around to installing it on my nice new machine. Wel now I had a real need, and it works a treat! I am just ashamed I took so long.

So Mister Microsoft, if you want to know why I am not using your product, it is simply because it does not work - nothing personal ;-)