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From: jimmy@therien.cs.UAlberta.CA (Jimmy the X-man)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Should I SWITCH to perl ?
Message-ID: <1991Feb1.181223.25788@cs.UAlberta.CA>
Date: 1 Feb 91 18:12:23 GMT
Sender: news@cs.UAlberta.CA
Distribution: na
Organization: for the criminally pleasant
Lines: 70

Folks,

I have been a sh/awk/sed user for a number of years; however, I was 
told by someone recently that perl can replace ALL of the above. Is
this true ? Was this the intention of the original design ? In other
words, if I concentrate in developing my perl skills, can I forget
about ever using the other utilities ?

I looked at the man page; it is quite detailed. However, learning 
this language requires a non-trivial effort and I would like to get
some input from experienced users before I change directions.

As a start, can anyone mail me the perl translations of the following
scripts ?  If anyone wants to respond, it would help if you put
comments which described what a given line does. This will help me
learn perl and decide if I should switch to using this language.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
#!/bin/sh -v
# Copy selected files to a backup directory for project quant. No
# arguments required.
QUA=/usr/alta/edm/jones/quant
   if [ ! -d $HOME/Bak_quant ];then
   mkdir $HOME/Bak_quant
   fi
# find files which do NOT match files in the name-list; do not descend
# into the /usr/alta/edm/jones/quant/inc directory
   for f in `find $QUA ! \(  -name "Makefile" -o -name "Makefile.bak" \
             -o -name "lib*.a" -o -name "quant" -o -name '*.o' \) \
             -print -name inc -prune | sed '1d'`
   do
   cp -r $f $HOME/Bak_quant/
   done
) &

---------------------------------------------------------------------

A perl script needed to put single quotes in the hex numbers in a
Fortran DATA statement of the form

       DATA A,B, /3, Z0F/, C, D, E,
     C /ZABC012, 10.0, ZFFF/

The DATA statement has 1 or more lines and all lines have
spaces/tabs at the beginning. If a line is a continuation
of the previous line, there is a character in the 6th 
column/field. There are many other lines of code in the program;
this operation needs to be done only one the lines beginning
with ^[ TAB]*DATA (line-type 1) 
      OR 
lines following line-type 1 and having ANY character in 
column/field 6 (line-type 2). A line type 2 may have spaces/tabs
between the character in column/field 6 and the following 
characters, if any
      OR 
line-type 2's following other line-type 2 lines

Thus, the above should generate
       DATA A,B, /3, Z'0F'/, C, D, E,
     C /Z'ABC012', 10.0, Z'FFF'/

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks in advance for the responses, folks.


Jimmy Mason
jimmy@cs.UAlberta.CA
--
jimmy@cs.UAlberta.CA