Hacker News Reader

al_form2000

> Perl is probably the closest but still has some warts related to redirection.

I wholehartedly agree on perl but can you expand on the redirection warts? I seldom had problems with perls' FHs, while, on the contrary I seem to be unable to wrap my head around the contorted syntax involved in bash's handling of descriptors - especially when more than 2 handles are involved.

View on HN

Well -- I was comparing Perl to Python in this case. There is roughly the same amount of boilerplate and both are easier to read than bash's redirection.

The wart is that you need IPC::Open3 or equivalent because Perl's intrinsics can not synthesize the pipe operator (though you will think that they can) if you need to insert yourself into the middle of a chain of commands.

Nowadays there are decent wrappers for calling Open3 but more commonly you just find people running one half of the command, buffering the output, and passing it to the second half.

Aw, right. I'd forgotten about IPC::Open3. Because I did not want to think about it, mostly (and so, I usually do exactly what you say people do :-) )

Reply on news.ycombinator.com