How Good Is Perl For Network Administration

what benefit will perl offer me over C??are there things that can be done in perl but not in C or is it just a matter if being easy when done in perl??
studying and experimenting with networks(windows and linux) is a hobby for me..so if i were to study C and only C ,but not perl or VC++,would that be a bad decision??
i could surely use some help here..i have always wondered whether i should try another language along with C..when samba,written in C, can connect to windows2000 and retrieve files, i feel that there is nothing like C and i ought to just concentrate on C only..
i am sure petemcevoy will have something to say here!!! HI Pete

Hello again scorpion.
I can't really comment on the benefits of perl over c, i don't do too much c programming - but i will always extoll the virtues of perl - it rocks, and it's not just as a language - there's a whole community involved in perl, no matter where you're from there's a good chance there's a perl monger's group near you. I'm a member of belfast perl mongers http://belfast.pm.org/ and people are very friendly.
What language you concentrate on scorpion, at the end of the day, is entirely down to personal preference - c is a powerful, robust language and if you do decide to stick with it you'll almost certainly find a use for it.
Good luck.

I'd suggest you go on with C - but do get put some of perl to use - its sometimes handy to write 2-3 lines of perl code to do the job you'd otherwise take more lines to do in C (regular expression matching....for example).

Hi Scorpion

For large complex sys admin tasks (and there shouldn't be many) C is a good language. Compiled programs run faster. However, for little short jobs, you may want to consider Perl, Tcl, Expect, and shell scripting. Perl is good as there are more people that learn it over the other languages, but Tcl and expect (an extension of the Tcl language) are just as good (and sometimes more readable). Tcl looks a lot like C code. Hope this helps.

Happy Hacking

using PERL over C does indeed have its benefits. PERL takes advantage of encapsulation offering many modules allowing you to perform various tasks with relative simplicity. Since it is a report language, it takes advantage of awk like expressions. PERL offers a faster development cycle as the need for compiling and linking is omited. PERL is a conveniance language, it will permit you to write powerful programs in short time frames, it is less picky than C and will be your friend.