2011-06-21 At university I am tutor for scripting languages. The students learn shell scripting first and Perl afterwards. The question is: Do they really learn something? Many tasks are operations on (simplified) CSV files. There are students who open them in Excel afterwards to examine their con- tent. OMG! Aren't we teaching shell programming in order that they don't need Excel for that anymore. But they rather start up the fat program, wait one minute until the file is fully loaded, just to take a quick glance into the file. Yes, the can solve problems with cut(1), tr(1), sed(1), but they haven't understood that these programs solve *real* everyday problems and thus use them everyday. If you think the contents of /etc/passwd is hard to read, pipe it through tr : \\t And if you are only interested in some of the many columns, add cut(1) to the pipeline. And if the field widths vary too much, use column(1) instead of tabs. This is what the students should have learned! But maybe the problem lies at some other point. If you can't touch-type or if the keyboard of your Netbook is so tiny that you can't touch-type or if you have difficulties typing a backtick, for instance, you simply won't reach the point where you profit from using the shell. Aditionally, I believe it's a fault to limit the CSV files to 65535 lines in order to not trouble Excel. No! The files *should be* longer in order to trouble Excel. Then the students would need to use adequate tools. If someone shows me the regexp /[0-9' ']/ to match a digit or a space, it's clear that he hasn't understood the basic concept of character classes. This understanding is conceptual understand- ing, which is the only one that matters. Similar if I see: print " foo \n " What does someone think when he writes such code? Finally a thought about myself. I surely am no Perl hacker. My knowledge bases on having read the Camel Book twice and some other books about Unix scripting. Until I started to be mentor for Perl programming, I had written no more than one single script in Perl. Now I do attend the lecture frequently and do the programming tasks. I surely became no Perl hacker, actually, I am frequently surprised by functions or operators students use. But I understood the concepts of Perl. That's most important. http://marmaro.de/lue/ markus schnalke