shell, perl, performance, parallelism, profiling, etc. (was: Upgrade guidance)

[Michael ODonnell]

>> Note, only valid in bash, not sh.
>
>Yah, and it doesn't matter if you use "#!/bin/bash" at the top
>if you're running the script with "sh foo.sh".  It took me five
>minutes to figure that out just now.  D'oh.

That process substitution facility is a favorite of mine but
it isn't POSIX, and IIRC /bin/bash acts as if you launched it
with the --posix option if you invoke it via /bin/sh

> I would actually suspect sort(1).  There's no really good way to
> do a sort; just minimally poor ways (and lots of really poor ways)

Various algorithms, animated:

   http://vision.bc.edu/~dmartin/teaching/sorting/anim-html/all.html