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writes:
> Real Perl programmers use real Perl functions and modules, and they
> resort to shell commands only when absolutely necessary (which is
> generally rare - I haven't used a raw shell command from Perl in three
> years).

Abigail will likely be around shortly, but in case I beat him to the
punch: Real Perl programmers use whatever bits of Perl are appropriate
to the task. Perl is a very nice glue language, and in many cases
it's clearer and simpler to perform a task using the OS's native tools
than Perl's. Perl also has a number of modules that are not always
the easiest way to do things, though they trend towards more
portability.

Case in point, and this is what convinced me Abigail was right,
File::Find. I personally find it infinitely more expressive to use
find(1) rather than File::Find, and since I work for a group whose
charter is to promote Linux and Open Source tools throughout the
company, I don't have to care about portability. There are other
examples; that's just the most obvious.

If your personal taste leans towards using only Perl, that's fine,
there's nothing wrong with that. But it is blatantly incorrect to
assert that "real Perl programmers" only use shell commands as a last
resort.

-=Eric

wrote:
> Reinhard Glauber wrote:
> > $answer = system("wget http://www.bla.de/bla/blaDetail.aspx?ID=$i");
>
> That's not Perl - that's a shell command with a little bit of Perl
> wrapped around it (and it's not even the right sort of Perl).
>
> Real Perl programmers use real Perl functions and modules, and they
> resort to shell commands only when absolutely necessary

So lets say it takes several minutes to uncompress a file through perl
applying many regexes (or index calls) to each line (Not to mention the
time it takes to find, convince someone to install on many machines, and
then learn how to use the decompression module), but only a few seconds to
open and then read from:

open my $fh, qq{zcat /foo/bar/gene2accession.gz|fgrep "$grepper"|} or die
$!;

Is a savings of ~100x in run time absolutely necessary or just a needless
convenience?

Real programmers use the right tools for the job, whatever those may be.

Xho

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wrote:
> IT DON'T GET NO MORE EASIER THAN THAT RIGHT THERE!

bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha

wrote:
> Reinhard Glauber wrote:
>> $answer = system("wget http://www.bla.de/bla/blaDetail.aspx?ID=$i");

> That's not Perl - that's a shell command with a little bit of Perl
> wrapped around it (and it's not even the right sort of Perl).

> Real Perl programmers use real Perl functions and modules, and they
> resort to shell commands only when absolutely necessary (which is
> generally rare - I haven't used a raw shell command from Perl in three
> years). The most common module for this purpose is LWP. But I always
> recommend the use of the super-duper-module IO::All
> (http://tinyurl.com/982wo), especially to novice programmers, because
> it provides a nice, EASY proxy to LWP (and a bunch of other functions
> and modules). How easy, you ask? Well, I'm REALLY GLAD you asked:

> #!/usr/bin/perl
> use warnings; use strict;
> use IO::All;

I think that should be:

use IO::All::LWP;

> my $content < io('http://example.org');
> print $content;
> __END__

Axel