Shell Programming and Scripting

I would argue with the statement that Perl is an add-on. It comes by default even with older UNIX systems like Solaris 8 or AIX 5 (don't know about older as I don't have access to those now). While AWK indeed can be found on any UNIX/Linux machine, the problem in my opinion is in its older versions' lack of features.

Anyway it is good to know both AWK and Perl .

That is my thought. I am teaching myself Perl. I am also learning more awk while at it. I can do simple things with both. The part I need to work harder on is taking huge gobs of data and twisting it into the desired output.

Thanks to everyone for the feedback.

I sent an email to our admin asking to order me these two books:

Amazon.com: Effective awk Programming (3rd Edition) (9780596000707): Arnold Robbins: Books

Amazon.com: The AWK Programming Language (9780201079814): Alfred V. Aho, Brian W. Kernighan, Peter J. Weinberger: Books

I am excited to get them, and hope that those in addition to my Perl books, along with reading this forum I will be on the way.

Like I said, I like to read this forum to see how the experts solve problems. There is more than one way to do things, right? I like to see all of those ways.

One last advice from me is to not only read the Forums, but also try and help posters with their problems. This is how I learned AWK and to some extent Perl . Good luck.

Good point. They are real life examples of exercises that you use the tools for. I have been lurking around for long time...it's time I get more involved.

The advise I now give people who ask me whether they should learn Perl is to first learn Python. Perl is the old kid on the sysadm block. Python is what more and more sysadm work is done with - at least on Linux systems.