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If you are comfortable with Perl/Tk, then I would suggest Perl2Exe. It can create a stand alone executable that contains everything you need to run the script. You can then ship just that one binary from machine to machine and have it run without problem... Well, no more problems that the Windows platform presents you with that is.

We use Perl2Exe at work for a few Perl based large applications and have been extremely pleased with the flexibility it provides in terms of distribution of our end product.

http://www.indigostar.com/perl2exe.htm

Not even if you compile the code before you distribute it?

The main downside is that you get an exe with a perl intepreter in it. If you have more than one script to build, get the pro versionand compile them with the -small option. That will build a dll which contains the interpreter, and the compiled exes link to it.

As far as your shell scripts, I'm not sure. I've run scripts under Cygwin, but they weren't very complicated and so I wouldn't know much about reliabilty or performance.

-B

Wrong, wrong (just), wrong!. (-:

Most of the useful Linux packages can be found (albeit sometimes a bit crippled) for MS-Windows (or nicely packaged for the Mac). What you don't usually get is smooth integration, full-throttle performance or regular updates. OTOH, very few attackers expect to find, for example, EXIM on MS-Windows, so attempts to priv-escalate to root don't work all that well. (-:

The advantages of Linux which my cutomers see (all of my customer sites are either Linux or planning to be Linux soon) are that I can quickly and cheaply set it up and then more or less forget it for a couple of years until a fan or hard disk fails (and yes, I do have and have had systems with years of continuous uptime on them); it's flexible enough to readily do a lot of stuff which is difficult-to-impossible (and usually clumsy) under MS-Windows; you don't need to worry about licensing; and it's never had a CodeRed or MSBlast equivalent. Different customers have additional different reasons for liking it, but that's all pretty much common ground. Cheap, reliable and flexible.

I don't see how the GP can price MS-Windows and and Linux systems at about the same on the same hardware, since the sites I share with MS-Windows all (bar one, who is ultra-careful about everything he does and visits the 40-seat site maybe every fortnight) have the MS techs constantly visiting to fix stuff up that should never break.

I had made many TK-perl appz (on win XP) compiled with Visual Studio 7, and everything is running fine on *unix and mac.
(I had less pain in tk-perl then using html+dhtml to be compatible with the above 3 OS.)

Hey and most of it is FREE. - (So stop it blaming on module incompatiblitys)

• www.indigostar.com (perl 2 exe)
• dada.perl.it
• (Each Win32 APIs or third-party or even homegrown DLLs are usable with perl.)
• Oreilly Perl bookshelf
• containing six books.

Komodo activestate.com is in my opinion one of the best editors and debuggers in this world. (Beside the new web package manager is a little bit buggy, but everything else works fine... And be sure to take a look at the great regex evaluator.)

And of course dont miss Larry Wall "O'Reilly Perl Programming" or Programming Ansi C by Brian W.Kernighan and Dennis M.Ritchie

Eighter i think you couldn't be a good unix admin without the knowledge and the module section of pe(A)rl.

As mentioned above it is a good looking interface but you dont want to teach them to depend on a nice looking gui for a database.

If they wont let you use IIS then can I suggest Microweb for a quick eval to see if you want to go the MySQL route. Just download it and burn it to a CD and then you can quickly and painlessly see how MySQL works on any win32 computer.

If you also download the phpMyAdmin and drop it into the cd you can use the graphical web-based frontend and see how simple and powerful it is.

I think you will have a much better educated class as a result of using an open source database. You will help them to see and understand the structure and interelation in tables outside of a slick gui. Then once they understand this then show them how to make their administration tasks easier with a gui.

It was reported on slashdot recently that Apache has a 2/3 market share, I wonder what MySql has for a market share of internet servers.

Anyway here is correct link for IndigoPerl, if it works this time, sorry again.

Not that this is on topic by any means, but here is a response.

Of the established solutions for compiling Perl into executables, at the forefront are IndigoStar's Perl2EXE and ActiveState's PerlApp. Both are commercial products. I've not had a reasonable impetus to buy either, but programs like AmphetaDesk, an RSS aggregator written in Perl, make impressive use of Perl2EXE. There may be a point in the future at which I might happily buy it--it just depends on the end I'm trying to meet with a given project. Sometimes preaching the freedom-of-software concept makes us forget that things can be worth money...

There's also perlcc, which comes standard with Perl, but it's in a "very experimental" stage and not recommended for production code.

So, there are options.

Of course, you aren't being a zealot by mentioning the advantages of one language over another. I've enjoyed reading all of the (reasonable) point/counterpoint comparisons between Python and Perl. I personally don't do enough programming in any of the areas where Python surpasses Perl's usefulness to make a serious switch. Perhaps in the future, I will.

What doesn't make sense is one's assumption that because he writes code in one language instead of another he is somehow of a superior race of beings. If there's any measure of superiority to be had, it more appropriately belongs to those who are familiar with (or even those who are willing to learn) more languages and environments and all of the necessary tricks and idioms to write an intelligent solution within any one of them.

But even if this is something that properly defines one's superiority, making a nuisance of oneself screaming about said superiority does an incredible lot to negate it.

Generic segue, an article about the BOFH becoming passé caught my eye today...

Actually Indigostar are the answer to this too. Indigoperl is a perl5.6.1 which requires no registry settings, and can be installed with a simple bat script (which adds to the path & does a file association).

Very high level languages like Perl are far easier to program in than lower level languages like C and C++. No worries about memory allocation, array sizes, easy string manipluation and so on...

But of all the software currently running on your desktop, probably none of it is written in Perl. Why? Because Perl cannot be truly compiled. Sure, using perlcc I can convert a Perl program to C, but this is still experimental and doesn't really work well. Systems like Perl2Exe and Activestate's Perl Dev Kit that package the perl compiler and program into an executable are an improvement, but the resulting executables are large and have a high start-up time.

I'm sure there will be some people who don't consider this problem: i.e. leave Perl on the server-side and for general sysadmin tasks, as C and C++ have already got the desktop sewn up, but just think how much easier and faster it would be to develop a program like a GUI FTP client in Perl.

If there was a true Perl compiler, Perl could easily become the language of choice for many if not all GUI applications. Currently the only end-user targeted GUI app I have seen written in Perl is UploadAway--and even this is hardly aimed at a mainstream audience.

Or did you mean, more like IndigoPerl? Perhaps you aren't aware that Perl has been available for Win32 systems for over four years, and that it's been ported to almost every other OS under the sun...

Or, more than likely, IHBT.