In the message dated: Fri, 20 Dec 2013 11:45:14 -0500, The pithy ruminations from Brandon Allbery on <Re: [lopsa-tech] A PERL question> were: => On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 11:35 AM, john boris <jbori...@gmail.com> wrote: => => > The perl script is called like this from another shell script that does => > some worlk => > => > perl weekdays.pl $school => > => => Change this to => => perl weekdays.pl "$school" =>
[PEDANTIC HAT ON] I'd suggest: weekdays.pl -s "$school" and ideally also accept: weekdays.pl --school "$school" weekdays.pl --school="$school" Except for an input filename as the final command-line argument, I'm strongly opposed to any 'bare' argument (not preceeded by a flag). Using flags can also make the command-line parsing easier, through the use of 'getopts', or by something like: #### horrible, untested, pseudo-code follows ### if ( $ARGV[$i] eq "-s" || $ARGV[$i] =~ /^--school$/ ) { $i++; while ( ! $ARGV[$i] =~ /^-/ ) { $school=$school . " " . $ARGV[$i]; $i++; } } else { if ( $ARGV[$i] =~ /^--school=/ ) { ($school,$ARGV[$i])=~s/^.*=//; } } I've seen way too much legacy code that has things like: program.pl xsize ysize parm1 parm2 zsize input output The lack of flags (option names) makes usage and maintenance difficult -- particularly months & years later when the specific meaning given to the _position_ of each argument has been forgotten. [PEDANTIC HAT OFF] Mark => -- => brandon s allbery kf8nh sine nomine associates => allber...@gmail.com ballb...@sinenomine.net => unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad http://sinenomine.net => => _______________________________________________ => Tech mailing list => Tech@lists.lopsa.org => https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech => This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators => http://lopsa.org/ => -- Mark Bergman Biker, Rock Climber, Unix mechanic, IATSE #1 Stagehand '94 Yamaha GTS1000A^2 berg...@panix.com http://wwwkeys.pgp.net:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=bergman%40panix.com I want a newsgroup with a infinite S/N ratio! Now taking CFV on: rec.motorcycles.stagehands.pet-bird-owners.pinballers.unix-supporters 15+ So Far--Want to join? Check out: http://www.panix.com/~bergman _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list Tech@lists.lopsa.org https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/