Perl Debugged

12.4. Tips for the Shell Programmer

You and the C programmer are Perl's favorite children (assuming that by “shell” we are talking about the Unix variety; the DOS/NT command line interface is quite a different beast). You alone among the other newcomers think it's quite natural for scalar variables to start with $, and you just need to get used to the fact that the $ is there during assignment as well as during reference. It may have seemed stifling at first that calls to external programs had to be wrapped in system(), although you were right at home with the use of backticks (``) to capture program output. But if you tried to compensate by using Shell.pm just to avoid those system() calls, try doing without. A shell script needs a low syntactical ...