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Old Unix sys admins made Perl special. Before Perl, they had to chain a bunch of sed, awk, grep, etc commands together or try to solve their problem in C. Both
by ef47d35620c1 13y ago
Old Unix sys admins made Perl special. Before Perl, they had to chain a bunch of sed, awk, grep, etc commands together or try to solve their problem in C. Both approaches were doable, but neither were ideal for the task. Perl was perfect for Unix scripting and sys admin tasks. From there, the rest is history.
- dded 13y agoOne of Perl's strengths, actually, was (is?) how well it was supported on many different types of systems. Today's world is largely Linux/Windows/Mac, but that was far less true in the 90s. I started using Perl on VMS, where there was no sed, (g)awk was new, no grep ("search" did not handle regular expressions, "find" did but arrived very late); and the command language, while sane, was very slow. Perl's system integration on VMS was excellent.
- loudmax 13y agoWhen I started working at AOL in 2002, I was given a list of commands and jobs to run manually on a Stratus VOS mainframe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratus_VOS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratus_VOS It was tedious and lame (not necessarily Stratus' fault). But then I discovered that someone had ported Perl to VOS! And I was able to script my daily routine away.