Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ukma!sean
From: sean@ms.uky.edu (Sean Casey)
Newsgroups: alt.sources.d
Subject: Re: Cmail - check to see who's read their mail - UNIX
Message-ID: <13034@s.ms.uky.edu>
Date: 24 Oct 89 18:15:34 GMT
References: <1121@kl-cs.UUCP> <2332@convex.UUCP> <932@lego.cs.utexas.edu>
Organization: The Leaning Tower of Patterson Office @ The Univ. of KY
Lines: 24

steveb@cs.utexas.edu (Steve Benz) writes:

|tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) writes:
|| [ In response to the people-who-don't-read-mail-checker ]
||So as an exercise, I rewrote the program in perl (version |>3.0).

|While I certainly find your program preferable to the original,
|I question your choice of Perl instead of a shell script.
|Granted, your Perl program would be faster on some systems, but
|(at the risk of making a baseless assertion) the Bourne shell is
|the standard language for writing administrative hackery.

Yes and look at the godawful mess of AT&T "face", or any other vendor
written shell scripts for that matter.

It was done in perl because perl is a considerably more powerful
programming language that runs on practically every Unix system and
some micros to boot. Just because Bourne shell is everywhere doesn't
mean it's the best tool.

-- 
***  Sean Casey          sean@ms.uky.edu, sean@ukma.bitnet, ukma!sean
***  Copyright 1989 by Sean Casey. Only non-profit redistribution permitted.
***  ``So if you weight long enough, you'll get your packets, right?''