Curtis Larsen wrote:

> Perl?  What's Perl?  <wicked maniacal laugh>

Bwah ha ha hahhhh :-)

> Seriously though -- what would Perl have over standard MPE JCL in
> doing this? (Quick -- somebody write a version of this app in both
> MPE JCL and Perl then compare the two)

If you restrict the MPE version from using posix toys, it's not much
of a contest.  If I had my perl book at home I'd offer the perl side
of this, but I'm still at the point where I can't write perl without
one hand on the keyboard and one on the manual (or similar code for
reference).

Seriously though, just 'grep' makes short work of the project.  Get a
list of the patches, grab and upshift the patch ID, and grep HPSWINFO
for it.  If $? is zero, generate a 'get' to an ftp stdin file.

One of the big strengths of perl is it's parsing and pattern matching.
Another is associative arrays or "hashes".  Then there are the add-on
perl modules.  Then...

> ...And why is this language so gosh-darn popular, anyway?

You must be a workaholic :-)  If you're lazy^H^H^H^Htime-impaired, you
would be well served by looking into it.  The learning curve is a little
steep (I'm hanging on for dear life) but well worth it.

> Curtis ("Maybe I really SHOULD read that Camel book...") Larsen

Get the perl5 edition, I still haven't figured most of the tricks that
came out in perl5.

> >From:  Ted Ashton[SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
> >Thus it was written in the epistle of Curtis Larsen,
> >> Has anyone ever written a job which gets a listing of patches from
> >> i3107ffs.external.hp.com, compares it to what's in their HPSWINFO,
> >> then asks a human for approval of what it, or another job, should
> >> download?

> >Probably not, but if I weren't absolutely dead and buried under the
> >workload at the moment, I'd whip you something out.  This is a
> >piece-a-cake for perl.

Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>