CSci 553
Spring 2006
LAB #3
Due Wed, Feb 22, Also Think about and work on your project proposal


(1) Do a perl tutorial

    I think the best one to work on is the one from www.perl.com.  Here is the url for the first part of the series:

    http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2000/10/begperl1.html


(2) Do a python tutorial

   Read over and work on the Software Carpentry introduction to Python
   tutorial.  This is the lectures/materials from "Basic Scripting"
   through "Object-Oriented Programming".  Note that with this site
   the author has recorded lectures he gave going over this material,
   which might be useful to some of you.

   If you would like more material to study python, look over the
   basic python tutorial at the python web site: www.python.org (look
   under the documentation link for the tutorial).

3) Write a script (in python or perl, your choice) to replicate some
of the functionality of the grep program.  The script should read in
from standard input, and scan each line for a string of text.  All
lines in the input that contain that text should be printed to the
standard output.  Extra credit if you use command line arguments to
allow the user to specify a file name (rather than using standard
input) and the string to search for.  Also for more credit and for
advanced students, explore the regular expression capabilities (of
whichever you are using perl or python).  Allow the user to specify a
regular expression to search for, rather than a simple text string.