awk or perl

[Rich Pierson]

I need to monitor some processes that are run inside a iplanet/bea server,
solaris9, clustered v880's. I have a .jsp that will retreive the page with
all the jobs and processes, it creates an html page, 285 lines, that has
two tables in it that have the job name, previous fire time, next fire
time, I tail the bottom half to eliminate the top table and save the bottom
one. I need to retrieve them, compare them and send an email to various
responsible parties. I've done it with one page, fixed line count every
time so I could head, tail, perl the formatting, string it to get all the
other stuff out then run a diff, works great, now the project manager wants
it to make coffee too, instead of having the devleopers fix the problem in
the code...he likes it so much he wants to monitor variable pages where the
head, tail line count won't work. I've not played with awk much for many
years and perl even less. Question is, which road do I head down, awk or
perl for a solution to this. Suggestions ? The variable length is whats
throwing me, now I have to look for specific strings and match them up.

[Eric]

Rich Pierson wrote:

I'm a little confused as to what your real problem is. i guess your
explanation is a little to quick for my brain.
Personally i cant stand perl, its repulsive. A combination of bash, awk, and
sed can do amazing things very easily and can even be deciphered by others at
a later date.
Eric