Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!decwrl!eda.com!jim From: jim@eda.com (Jim Budler) Newsgroups: alt.sources.d Subject: Re: Cmail - check to see who's read their mail - UNIX Message-ID: <1989Oct26.031733.22507@eda.com> Date: 26 Oct 89 03:17:33 GMT References: <1121@kl-cs.UUCP> <2332@convex.UUCP> <932@lego.cs.utexas.edu> <13034@s.ms.uky.edu> <14793@bfmny0.UU.NET> <13048@s.ms.uky.edu> <936@rodan.cs.utexas.edu> Organization: EDA Systems,Inc. Santa Clara, CA Lines: 68 steveb@cs.utexas.edu (Steve Benz) writes: } In article <13048@s.ms.uky.edu> sean@ms.uky.edu (Sean Casey) writes: } The point I munged in my previous post was that since it's not installed } on all machines, and not necessarily known by the system administrators at } those sights which have it, that perhaps it wasn't the ideal choice of } language (though it's a damn sight better choice than C.) } - Steve Heated words (not actually quoted above), for a simple pair of concepts. o sh + numerous basic unix utilities (sed, awk, ...) are generally available and familiar to administrators. Different versions of all portions exist. All bourne shell, awk, sed scripts are not fully portable because of this. o perl is new, flexible, and can be used for automating most administrative tasks. Available in source, for many machines, including non-UNIX. Not familiar to most administrators. They are not mutually exclusive points of view. Mild flame time: If a functional program is posted in , it is counter productive to post a discussion of the relative merits of the choice of language. If you want to *demonstrate* an increased functionality of a then post source. Increased flame: I'm perfectly happy letting people worry about their own mail. I use 'watcher' (courtesy Kenneth Ingham, UNM Computing Center, Albuquerque, NM) to tell me when the file system gets too full. Nevertheless, the source code was useful 'cause it demonstrated useful capabilities. Don't discourage useful code. All flamed out. jim P.S. with all the moderators deciding what 'alternate' source is useful lately, I guess mod.sources wasn't so bad 8^( P.P.S here's some source, in perl. Now this is NOT very useful :^) Maybe not even correct 8^) -------------- cut here --------------- : This is a shar archive. Extract with sh, not csh. : The rest of this file will extract: : jul echo extracting - jul sed 's/^X//' > jul << '!EOR!' X#! /usr/bin/perl X X($a,$b,$c,$e,$f,$g,$h,$i,$j) = localtime(time); X++$i; Xprint "Julian date is $i\n"; !EOR! -- Jim Budler jim@eda.com ...!{decwrl,uunet}!eda!jim compuserve: 72415,1200 applelink: D4619 voice: +1 408 986-9585 fax: +1 408 748-1032