Don't get caught up in the hype - the Zen of "The Unix Philosophy"

[Kevin D. Clark]

Lloyd Kvam writes:

> I do agree with his basic point.  Use the system tools to glue your
> processing into a series of simple steps.

Shell scripts are very powerful.  I don't take anybody seriously who
thinks otherwise.

I wrote a shell script once that automated an extremely tedious (took
days/weeks to complete) task.  It took me one single caffeine-induced
night of hacking to put together this script.

My boss later told me that he estimated that this shell script saved
the company well over a half-a-million dollars.

Later, after my night of feverish shell-script hacking, I rewrote the
script in Perl (because 3000-line shell scripts are hard to grok...)
and I did lots of other cool stuff with this new version of the
script.

If I hadn't been able to easily prototype this thing in terms of a
shell script, it would have taken me a long, long time to get it
done...if ever...

--kevin
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