Noob Question

[Andy Johnson]

> awk seems extremely outdated. At a time, its strength was to be always
> available on any Unix machine
>
> I vote for Python, just to start a nice language war.

Agreed, but I think for a beginner just wanting to do some simple tasks, 
Expect might also be a good start..

I've not given Python a fair shake, but I haven't run into much I couldn't 
do with Perl. Plus the existing software and modules out there for Perl keep 
you from reinventing the wheel.