> m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote: >>> mark wrote: >>>> Les Mikesell 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 *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 <snip> mark