[CentOS] question on grep

Fri Oct 12 03:52:40 UTC 2007
Ross S. W. Walker <rwalker at medallion.com>

William L. Maltby wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 2007-10-10 at 16:10 -0400, Ross S. W. Walker wrote:
> > Stephen Harris wrote:
> > > 
> > > On Wed, Oct 10, 2007 at 04:32:30PM -0300, mups.cp wrote:
> > > > <snip>
> 
> > Well he never stated a non-standard field separator, but if 
> that is the case, with awk:
> > 
> > echo "jerry,jerry-jerry jerry" | awk 
> 'BEGIN{RS="[^[:alnum:]]"} /^jerry$/ {jerry++} END{print jerry}'
> > 
> > That'll separate records by any non-alphanumeric.
> > 
> > (I had messed up the comparison on my first post)
> 
> I just wanted to say thanks to Ross for reminding folks on the list
> about the existence of the venerable (g)awk.
> 
> I think a lot of folks would be pleasantly surprised about 
> its power and
> simplicity of use, if one is already regex familiar.
> 
> Personally, in many years of use, I feel I still do not need to learn
> Perl (although I did get a book and dabble with it some) for 99.9% of
> things that *I* do.
> 
> Awk does the job for me.

Well thank you, but we shouldn't forget about sed either, it is even
smaller and can be just as powerful too (check out some of the
advanced sed scripts floating around the net).

I like perl for the advanced scripting applications it can create,
but like python and other rich scripting languages sometimes it is
just a little thick for what needs to be done.

With such an extensive tool box there is always just the right tool
for the job.

-Ross

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