Pcregrep vs Perl vs Python for bash scripting when needing advanced regex features?

Question

I've lately been using `pcregrep` to do Perl-style group matching when doing my bash scripts.The problem with `pcregrep` is that it's not readily available on Linux machines in general.An alternative would be to run Perl one liners or maybe, if possible, Python one liners to do those matches.I was wondering how good of an approach would this be? I don't know how fast both Perl and Python are initializing, as I can imagine that if my script has to consecutively make Regex matches and every time it needs to spawn a new instance of either Perl or Python, things can go slow fast. On the other hand, I don't feel like investing at the moment on learning the full languages, so I can do the whole script in them (Perl seems to be mostly a dead language, Python is the new king).How do you guys deal with this (or similar?) situations?

Answer 1

When it comes to text processing, really nothing beats Perl. If you're going to be working with text in the shell, I'd use Perl over Python hands down. For one, Perl has first class shell integration, something that none of the modern languages have really appreciated. And that's fine, they're all much better at larger scale applications than Perl is. But when it comes to manipulating text, you can't beat Perl's first class shell integration and how naturally it works with regular expressions.