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. > > -Ross > <snip sig stuff> -- Bill