Re: TIFF to PDF

[mike808@users.sourceforge.net]

> > But Steve's script wasn't a perl script, was it?  I thought that it
> > was just a straight shell script.  I'm not sure exactly what SED and
> > AWK do, and I'm not sure if the functionality of those two...
> > applications(?)... is or is not found in perl.

Perl does everything AWK and SED do. SED = Stream EDitor. AWK (named
after the authors, Aho, Weinberger and Kernighan) is a simple language that 
processes a file line by line and the "program" consists of a series of 
"if you see this pattern, do this" commands. A SED "program" consists of a 
series of 'vi' commands (I know technically, this is backwards, but it helps 
to KISS) - substitute this for that, and some of the things that AWK can do. 
Using 'sed' is kind of like being able to use 'vi' where you can currently 
use 'grep' in a pipeline of GNU commands.

> Perl is a high level programming language thats often
> refered to as the swiss army chainsaw because it can do almost anything.

You would want to switch to Perl if, for example, you wanted to work with
data that came from a URL or a database or a mailbox or a file in some
specific format or an RSS feed or a Web Service or a SOAP request. 
It's a lot harder to get at those kinds of data (simultaneously if needed) 
using just atomic GNU tools and shell commands. It can be done, but 
programmers tend to like the unified access from a single Perl script than 
learning all of the various options and commands of the separate tools. 
I know I'd rather learn Perl once than sed, awk, bash, cut, grep, find, wget, 
paste, diff, ls, et cetera separately. That doesn't prevent me from
learning each separately or using them - even from within a Perl program -
it just is easier for me to not switch contexts when solving a problem.

Mike808/

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