Bah, humbug.

Well, maybe not that bad. Actually, not “bad” at all: I have no real complaints about this book, but I didn’t like it and can’t imagine handing it to anyone with a hearty “Here, read this, you’ll love it”.

As I whined at my review of the similarly named “Wicked Cool Shell Scripts”, the title alone is enough to put me in a bad mood.

But “Wicked Cool Shell Scripts” at least was interesting from the view that the tasks presented are actually hard to do in a shell script, and therefore were at least cool in that sense.

I said at that review “if you need anything complex at all, Perl or something else is probably a much better way to to it”, and here’s the Perl book, so what’s my problem?

It isn’t “wicked cool”. This is a jumbled pile of Perl scripts designed to do the kinds of things Perl is very good at doing, and that’s why there’s nothing cool about it: doing these kinds of things in Perl requires nothing more than a basic understanding of the language and now and then where to look for a useful module.

What’s cool about that?

The “Wicked Cool Shell Scripts” showed you how you could build a house using a jacknife and a rock; you’d have to be an idiot to do it, but it is awe inspiring.

This book shows you how to do it after cleaning out Sears tool department.

Oh, maybe I’m massively unfair. Maybe somone would like this book, but I don’t think anyone reading at this site will.

*Originally published at APLawrence.com

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A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com

My take on this would be that I don’t really think that the two are even slightly similar in sytanx, semantics or even intended use.

The only thing that I have found in common is the use of the “;” to signify the end of the line.

• The OO implementation is not similar, C# is strictly Object Orientated, whilst I think that Perl was not and is not intended to be OO (I know a lot of people will disagree with me).

  I just don’t think Perl’s OO functionality is that intuative, it is like Javascripts OO: Obtuse!

• C# has a very strict and highly developed Framework that can be used from the start, Perl has lots of modules that you have to install, by default though you would do everything yourself.
• The semantics in C# are stricter, that is you can may tend to do things in one way, other people would tend to do it the same way too.

  In Perl at least it seems to me that you can do everything many many ways, which a lot of people like because one person doesn’t code the same as another; it is not forced on you.

• Perl has Regex’s built in to the language, in C# Regex’s are an object that you construct etc.

I use perl because I can do a lot of work quickly in it, and my site is based on a Linux server.

I use C# because I like the langague and it is my job.

There are many more reasons that the languages are completly different. This was my take.

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Paul Kinlan is the author of the popular C#, .Net Framework blog. Paul is an Analyst Developer working in Southport, England. Paul has several years experience developing and designing massively scalable enterprise systems on UNIX and Windows based architectures.

Member ericjw says:

I am not a back-end person, but I try my hardest to understand. I have recently been considering a phase 2 design for our site. It’s a match-making style website in a niche industry. I had several programmers actually turn my work down because it was written in Perl. He then was telling me about re-engineering my site.

Do I have a dinoasar on my hands? What are the implications for future growth? Am I trying to try to grow my business on something that will be obsolete in several years?

These are all fair questions to which a few WebProWorld posters seemed eager to answer. Member stymiee replies:

Perl has been passed by PHP in terms of popularity for web-based software. But Perl itself is hardly obsolete. The odds are they just don’t know Perl and are trying to convince you to redo your site so they can get the job and the big payday.

You will find it a little more difficult to find Perl programmers then other more popular languages but you should still be able to do it without it costing you an arm and a leg.

Then came Kgun with a thoughtful answer (or opinion at least):

1. I have not coded a single line in Perl and do not know the language. I know PHP fairly well.

Final word: The fine thing with OO PHP is that you can write a database connection class (API) that can be used independent of platform, be it MySQL, PostgreSQL … If you do it correct, you need only change a single line in your code to change database platform.

Please check out the thread and add your two cents to the discussion or at the very least read what other members have added.

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I ran into this in attempting a seemingly simple change in some customer’s code; it wasn’t hard to fix, but I simply do not understand why this happened.

Well, that’s not precisely true: it happened because I went ahead in a hurry and added something “quick”. It was just a new loop around some existing code. Ordinarily I would have written it like this:

@foo=qw(foo ba);
foreach $loopvar (@foo) { ..

But for some reason I did this instead:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# no problem here
caroomba("first");

sub caroomba {
my $p=shift;
print "Caroomba called $p\n";
open(I,"./t");
while (<I>) {
# stuff..
}
close I;
}

When run, that produces:

Caroomba called first
Caroomba called foo
Caroomba called ba
Caroomba called foo2
Caroomba called ba2
Caroomba called foo3 Modification of a read-only value attempted at ./t.pl line 23, <I> line 23.

Why? Dude, werent you listening? I do not comprehend why. Some person with more brains than I currently have will have to explain that one to both of us.

*Originally published at APLawrnece.com

A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com

You’d almost always see this in files like /etc/printcap, but there are plenty of other places where this convention is used.

A file with continuations might look like this:

This \
is \
one \
line.

and any program reading that is supposed to see it as:

This is one long line.

The “\” is supposed to immediately precede the line feed with no blanks, spaces or anything else between. This rigidity sometimes causes problems when folks use GUI editors to change files; they don’t notice the extra spaces and subsequently programs fail.

Bash (and ksh) handle these lines by default. Using the file above as input, we can write a simple script and get one line as output:

$ while read line; do echo $line; done < t
This is one line.
$

$ while read -r line; do echo $line; done < t
This \
is \
one \
line.
$

Adding spaces after each “\” produces something yet again different:

# (spaces added to file)
$ while read line; do echo $line; done < t
This
is
one
line.
$

The missing “\”‘s are because now they are simply seen as quoting the spaces. But if you use “read -r” on the same file, it’s not seen as quoted:

# (same file, extra spaces after \)
$ while read -r line; do echo $line; done < t
This \
is \
one \
line.

Perl

Given Perl’s strong Unix roots, you might think it would recognize this convention also or at least have some funky variable you could set or unset. Nope:

$ cat t.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl
while (<>)
{
print ;
}
# (original file, no spaces after \)
$ ./t.pl < t
This \
is \
one \
line.
$

Section 8.1 of my Perl Cookbook presents an example program that looks for \’s, strips them and gathers full lines.

Apache groks continuation lines, and you can find stuff scattered around for more general cases: Matching line continuation characters.

Interestingly, the Perl debugger does understand backslash continuation: (from “`perldoc perldebug”):

Multiline commands

If you want to enter a multi-line command, such as a subroutine definition with several statements or a format, escape the new-line that would normally end the debugger command with a back-slash. Here’s an example:

DB<1> for (1..4) { \
cont: print "ok\n"; \
cont: }
ok
ok
ok
ok

Note that this business of escaping a newline is specific to interactive commands typed into the debugger.

*Originally published at APLawrence.com

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Gossip site Valleywag has reported the pending launch of Google Code Search. The site received news of the announcement, which is embargoed until 9 PM PDT today.

“According to a journalist, Google’s new product will launch already larger than the two main source code search engines, Koders and Krugle,” said Valleywag.

Google first debuted its competitor to SourceForge in July. Called Project Hosting, Google claimed it was not competing with SourceForge and pledged not to permit the creation of namespaces that duplicated projects on SourceForge.

The code repository at Project Hosting quickly began to fill with new contributions. Languages like Perl and others have a variety of projects appearing in Google’s repository.

It was noted in July that Google’s full-text search and version control for Project Hosting would draw upon Google’s existing technologies for search and storage. Code Search will be a logical extension of their services to developers.

Update: Google did launch the new service, and we have added the link to the first paragraph.

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Government Computer News compared Perl 6 to “the ever-M.I.A. Duke Nukem computer game,” and considering Wall’s observation that it isn’t ready yet, Duke Nukem Forever might be a fair comparison.

Coders probably have more confidence in Wall than 3D Realms, and justifiably so. 3D Realms had said they would not release screenshots of the game because they want players to be surprised while playing the game. Somehow it appears fans may be more surprised if they ever get the game.

Perl 6 has a surprise in store, and that is “whatever.” Or as Wall showed in one of his presentation slides, 1..*. “Actually, “whatever” is such an important concept that we built it into Perl 6. This is read, ‘from one to whatever’,” Wall said.

He extended the discussion of the topic from here:

When it comes to the delivery date, Wall is equally “whatever” about that, as he and the Perl community have been, historically:

Or as Wall put it in his closing slide, relating that to the opening mnemonic for remembering “the old Linnean taxonomy of biological classification”: Kid Perl Completes One Final Growth Spurt.

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Have you wanted to become more comfortable using Flash with Yahoo’s web services? Now you can.

Jeffery Bennett posted the news at Yahoo’s Developer Center blog:

Noted Yahoo staffer and blogger Jeremy Zawodny also noted the debut of the Flash center, along with one for Ruby developers. “What languages should we do next?” he asked in the post, to which several people replied, “Perl.”

Back to Flash. At Yahoo’s new center, a few resources have been made available already to developers. A quartet of how-to articles discuss the ins and outs of performing a Yahoo search, using ActionScript with Yahoo Maps, creating a Yahoo Music Jukebox plug-in, and mashing up Flash with Yahoo’s event service, Upcoming.org.

Several links to useful downloads and other external resources appear at the Flash Developer Center. The site also makes note of what a developer will need to get started with Yahoo:

•  Adobe Flash 8 Professional
•  A Yahoo API Key
•  YahooAPI class and examples
•  An Application ID

After registering that ID with the Yahoo API class, development can begin. Yahoo’s how-to examples take the developer through the process of setting up the event handler, and demonstrating how to invoke, for example, the static Yahoo search method.

Interested developers may wish to make their way to Yahoo’s first public Hack Day on September 29-30. See the site for more details.

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FrSIRT said in its advisory that the pair of flaws pose problems for users of the Webmin and Usermin web-based interfaces. Both are written in Perl 5 and employ CGI scripts deliver their functionality.

The advisory described the two issues, as reported to FrSIRT by Keigo Yamazaki, Little eArth Corporation:

The flaws pose a moderate risk to systems running vulnerable versions of Webmin, as they are remotely exploitable. Cross-site scripting would be the attack vector used, according to the information posted at Secunia about the issues:

Webmin developers have fixed both vulnerabilities in the development version of Webmin, 1.296, and Usermin, version 1.226.

System administrators on Unix use Webmin to make configuration changes for services and manage accounts. Usermin provides an interface for regular users to read mail and do other user-level functions. Blogger Chris Dorner hosts a walkthrough of Webmin and screenshots of it in action.

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