On Sat, 3 Nov 2001 18:16:32 +0000 (GMT), in perl.unicode you wrote:
In practice, Perl has long ago replaced grep, sort, tr, awk, for all but
sentimental reasons.
I'd like to disagree with 'sort'. In some cases, at least, the
system-supplied sort(1) can do disk-based (merge?) sorting, enabling you
to sort files larger than the amount of virtual memory you have
installed. This is a task that's not trivial to do in Perl[1].
Cheers,
Philip
[1] It's undoubtedly not *hard*, if you know the algorithm, but it's not
*trivial* in the way that you can usually replace grep/tr/awk/sed
scripts with a Perl script trivially.
