Unix Shell programming Vs. C programming (which is better?)

[sbasak]

While dealing with Unix text files, I found that a lot of people prefer file manipulation writing shell scripts rather than processing using C.

My question is that, what is more efficient, shell programming or C programming?

A C program, when run compiled, works as single process, but every shell command is a process, doesn't it mean that C code is more efficient?

Thanks for any help :-)

[parksie]

C programming, definitely.

Although it depends what you define as "efficient". If you want to do an operation on ten million rows of a text file, C will be much faster. However, it'll take you longer to write, so in total, a shell script might be faster.

A lot of shell commands are implemented as shell builtins, so they won't spawn another process.

[jim mcnamara]

Also depends on the shell what is available or builtin.

Yesterday, someone needed 380,000 addresses, RIGHT NOW.
I wrote a perl script. Consider learning perl.

Efficiency is in the eye of the beholder. Compiled C is faster, but for a one-up of 40 pages of text, who cares?. If it is run 1000 times a day, use perl, C, FORTRAN, whatever. Not script.

Actually, real efficiency is cost-based. It it more expensive to have a user wait 5 seconds vs ten seconds or more efficeint to pay a programmer to work an extra hour? Depends on your shop.
Are you running the smallest unix box avaialble with 500 users? Then pay the programmer.

[sbasak]

Yes, I agree that efficiency depends on the particular problem.

However, another advantage of using C is that, if the applications ever need to be ported to some different platform say, Windows form Unix, then changing C source code will be much easier than re-writing shell scripts.

[parksie]

Not necessarily. A lot of things rely on POSIX features which Windows has a very poor implementation of.

Plus, you can just run the shell program on Windows (Cygwin can do both of these, though).

[CornedBee]

Not everyone wants to install cygwin on their windows computer.

Give the programmer a little more time and he should be able to write the app in a completly portable way.