m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote: > >>>>>> Awk is just too weird for normal people. I wouldn't even suggest >>>>>> reading that manual. If you can't do what you want with regexps and >>>>>> a >>>>>> pipeline of simpler programs, you might as well use perl. >>>>> <Looks around, yeah, this *is* a list for sysadmins of Linux....> >>> Reading the response, I realize you were serious, not being funny, as I >>> thought. >> Yes, I'm serious that if you don't already know awk, there is little to >> be gained from looking at it now. Perl can do everything awk can do and >> more, while shell scripts can do the simpler things. > > Ok, there's no point to continuing this - I use whatever tool I feel like, > and which is simplest to me to do the job: the *Nix way. I also know a > perl bigot when I see one. You seem to have missed all the places that I mentioned already knowing awk as an exception. I'm just not recommending taking the time to learn it if you don't already - and if you want to call logical conclusions for the reasons I posted bigotry, fine - be that way. > You *also* missed the reason I was pushing the original poster to read the > man page, rather than just do what I said, without trying to understand > what I was suggesting they do - they made a sytactical mistake that would > have had the *same* result in perl - he missed the closing / on the > expression Sure, but perl would have told you 'search pattern not terminated at line xx', or you would have gotten this from running 'perl -c' to check syntax ahead of time. Would you care to disclose how many of your own hours you've wasted on the mysteries of awk before you learned to read that carefully? -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com