I have to do some things on a Sun Solaris box where the only scripting languages available are sh and perl. No python, no ruby, no … well you get the point.

I don’t like PERL a lot, even though the monks are chanting it’s praise. Granted, it can do amazing stuff, but then a horde of monkeys typing away on their keyboard would probably sooner come up with a syntactically valid PERL program, than with a Shakespeare sonnet or even a simple haiku.

Anyway: If there’s nothing else available, PERL is still better than sh. So I’m biting the bullet and coding in PERL – and amazingly enough, mostly the stuff works. But it can be done better – here’s a series of articles that help beginners like me change our ways of programming:

• Program Repair Shop and Red Flags
• Return of Program Repair Shop and Red Flags
• Program Repair Shop and Red Flags – Parsing Info Files
• Red Flags Return
• Common Beginner Mistakes
• Some more Red Flag stuff

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