Re: Question for DBAs who use perl?

rgaffuri_at_cox.net said...
> What do you use it for? Trying to decide whether I should spend the
> time to learn the basics. Looks like its just a scripting language
> that allows for file manipulation. Is there anything in perl that I
> cant do with awk or with Korn easily?
>

It's probably most often used as a CGI scripting language for serving up web pages, sometimes based on data retrieved from a database. IMO, it's much more powerful than Korn shell scripts. It has a lot of siblings that do similar things ... like Python or awk variants (nawk, gawk, etc).

Personally, I think it lost a lot of its popularity when it was unjustly accused of being a security concern (which was actually a problem with poorly-written, server-side scripting languages in general).

It's not a bad language to learn. But like most languages, if you don't use it very often, you'll quickly forget the syntax. The best bet is to wait until you need it for a specific job/task, then learn it.

It's a great way to analyze Oracle log files. Very powerful regular expression capability. Not as cryptic as awk; more cryptic than Python. Any computer language always has its disciples and its critics.

-- 
/Karsten
DBA > retired > DBA