July 2005
Intermediate to advanced
544 pages
13h 8m
English
Content preview from Perl Best PracticesBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 14. Command-Line Processing
The demiurge sits at his teletype, pounding out one command line after another, specifying the values of fundamental constants of physics:
universe -G 6.672e-11 -e 1.602e-19 -h 6.626e-34….
and when he's finished typing out the command line, his right pinky hesitates above the ENTER key for an aeon or two, wondering what's going to happen; then down it comes—and the WHACK you hear is another Big Bang.
—In the Beginning was the Command Line
Perl started out as a language that was "also good for many system administration tasks"[82]. In the beginning, Larry created it to help him write utility programs for data mining, report generation, text munging, stream filtering, and pattern matching; as an easy way to build new command-line tools, without the constraints of shell scripting or the burdens of C programming.
Nearly two decades on, Perl is still beloved by sysadmins, toolsmiths, and other denizens of the shell, as a fast and powerful way to create new testaceous utilities. And for most of these utility programs, the command line is still the primary user interface.
If you're designing a new tool, script, utility, application, or suite, chances are it will need some kind of command-line interface. If it does, make sure that interface is convenient, powerful, flexible, mnemonic, consistent, and predictable.
Sounds difficult? It is. In fact, it's even more difficult than it sounds. But this chapter provides some guidelines that can help. ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.