In Perl scripts, should we use shell commands or call Perl functions that imitate shell operations?

Question

I want to know about the best practices here. Suppose I want to get the content of some line of a file. I can use a one-line shell command to get my answer, or write a subroutine, as shown in the code below.

A text file named some_text:

She laughed. Then both continued eating in silence, like strangers,
but after dinner they walked side by side; and there sprang up
between them the light jesting conversation of people who are free
and satisfied, to whom it does not matter where they go or what
they talk about.

Code to get content of line 5 of the file

#!perl
use warnings;
use strict;

my $file = "some_text";
my $lnum = 5;
my $shellcmd = "awk 'NR==$lnum' $file";
print qx($shellcmd);
print getSrcLine($file, $lnum);

sub getSrcLine {
    my($file, $lnum) = @_;
    open FILE, $file or die "$!";
    my @ray = <FILE>;
    return $ray[$lnum-1];
}

I ask this because I see a lot of Perl scripts where at some point, a shell command was called, while at some later point, the same task was done by a call to a (library or handwritten) function, for example, rm -rf versus File::Path::rmtree. I just want to make it consistent.

What is the recommended thing to do?

Answer 1

If there's a Perl function for the operation, Perl thinks you should use its version. However, you give an example of a Perl module providing a pure Perl way to do it. That's much different. There's no single answer (as in most things), so you have to decide for yourself what to do:

• Does the pure Perl approach do it correctly? For example, File::Copy has some limitations because it makes some awkward decisions for the user, so many people think it's broken. See, for instance, File::Copy versus cp/mv.

• Does pure Perl approach do it in an acceptable time? Sometimes the external program is orders of magnitude faster. Sometimes it's a lot slower.

• External commands usually are portable within a family of systems (e.g. all linux-like systems) but probably not across families (e.g. Windows and linux). Your tolerance for that might affect your answer. Even if you think you are running the same command, the different flavors of unix-like systems might have different switches for the operations.

• Passing complicated arguments—spaces, quotes, and special characters—to external commands can make you cry. You have to do a lot of fiddly work to make sure you're handling arguments correctly. Perl subroutines don't care though.

• You have to pay much more attention to what you are doing when you are using the external command. If you just call rm, Perl is going to search through your PATH and use the first thing called rm. That doesn't mean it's the program you think it is. I write about this quite a bit in the "Secure Programming Techniques" in Mastering Perl.

• If the pure Perl approach requires a module, especially if that module has many complicated dependencies, you might be in for dependency or distribution hell down the road.

Personally, I start with the pure Perl approach until it doesn't work for the situation.

For your particular examples, I'd use Perl. Shelling out to awk, which is a proto-Perl, is just odd. You should be able to do everything awk does right it Perl. If you have an awk program, you can convert it to Perl with the a2p program:

 NR==5

a2p turns that into (modulo some setup bits at the start):

while (<>) {
    print $_ if $. == 5;
}

Notice that it still scans the entire file even though you have the fifth line. However, you can use the translated program as a start:

while (<>) {
    if( $. == 5 ) {
        print;
        last;
        }
}

I don't think you should shell out to some other program to avoid that Perl code.

To remove a directory tree, I like File::Path. It has some dependencies, but they are all in the Perl Standard Library. There's very little pain, if any, associated with that module. I'd use it until I ran into a problem where it didn't work.

Answer 2

If you want your app to be portable to non-unix systems, then definitely code everything in Perl.

If not, it's really up to you... creating a new process is slower, but if it's not important for the task then it doesn't matter. Personally I would pick the solution which I can quicker implement.