[Tutor] parsing sendmail logs

[Jeff Younker]

> If you run a pipeline chain from within subprocess every part of the
> chain will be a separate process, thats a lot of overhead. Thats why
> admins tend to prefer writing utilities in Perl rather than bash  
> these days.
> ...

Nobody I know uses perl for systems administration because it doesn't
have the cost of forking a process.  They use it because you have real
data structures, functions, access to system calls, etc. with one  
*cough*
consistent syntax.   One of perl's big selling points for system
administration is that it is *so* easy to fork off a shell and read  
its output.

The argument that processes are too expensive might have had some
truth back in '92 or '93 when machines had 8M or 16M of memory, had
500M hard drives, and ran at a fraction of the speed they do now, but
that was a long time ago.

-jeff