On Oct 25, 2017, at 11:00 AM, Leroy Tennison leroy@datavoiceint.com wrote:
Although "not my question", thanks, I learned a lot about array processing from your example.
Yeah, it’s amazing how many obscure corners of the Bash language must be tapped to solve such a simple problem. I count 7 features in that script that I almost never use, because I’d have just written this one in Perl if not required to write it in Bash by the OP.
I expect that’s why the features are obscure to you, too: once you need to step beyond POSIX 1988 shell levels, most people just switch to some more powerful language, owing to the dark days when even a POSIX shell was sometimes tricky to find, much less a post-POSIX shell. (Can you say /usr/xpg4/bin/sh ? Yyyeahh…)
That situation threw a long shadow over the shell scripting landscape, where relatively few dare to tread, even today.