[jsyolo]

Not being snarky, why not python over perl? what makes perl better for scripts?

[e63f67dd-065b]

Perl is much more terse for one-liners and has much more built-in for doing text processing in scripts. Stuff like implicit read loop, field separation, etc. I would say they're suitable for different jobs: if a perl script grows beyond a hundred lines (you can do a surprising amount in that space!), then Python may be the right tool.

Perl is also much more of a known target: some version of it exists on basically every single Unix, and the language really hasn't changed that much in the past decade. I have SSH'ed into multiple CentOS 6/SLES 11 (released 2009, and granted mostly to rescue data off them) servers in the past 2 years, and perl is just much more of a known target to write things against than whatever python release is on that system.

[inejge]

what makes perl better for scripts?

Having an implicit line- and field-splitting loop for standard input with a couple of command-line switches. (Awk doesn't even need switches, but is cumbersome if you need initial state.) This covers a lot of use-cases. Also, very compact and powerful regular expressions.

[reddit_clone]

Perl is a progression of that particular environment. It is a superset of shell/grep/awk/sed.

A shell command works exactly as you would expect copied literally inside a backquote. With all the other goodies of a real programming langauge.

Doing this in Python (to me atleast) seems unnatural.

[Spooky23]

By the time you figure out which env you need to be using with python, you’ll forget why you needed it.

[maleldil]

If all you're doing is text processing that Perl can do out of the box, you probably only need the Python stdlib.