program to run another program Sender: Linux

On Tue, 16 Aug 2005 20:41:04 +0200, Tristan Miller

It was just the most basic example, and of course you might be able to do it in a 1 line shell script. I could make a 1-liner perl script too. But I feel that you are missing the point of the "flexibility" which can be easily added to this perl script, which would be extremely cumbersome in a shell script.

What if, for instance, he wanted to sample the input names, and make a different size thumbnail for each different input photo? Or what if he wanted to take those "differently sized" thumbnails and generate a custom html page with them spaced according to their custom size, with links to the full photo? This is all easily done with Perl, with only a few more lines.

Now don't get me wrong, I admire good shell programmers, but to be honest, I find the shell syntax too far removed from the "reality" of most languages. I can read c, Perl, Python, PhP, etc., and basically understand the statements and what they do, because they have a common basis. Whereas shell, is "out in right field" when it comes to complicated scripts. But then again, I'm a "left fielder". :-)

-- I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.