saberworks,
Sometimes it's pointless to use perl.
This is very true. There are plenty of command line utilities and variants that were designed for a very specific task that they do very well. Not an exhaustive list, but I am quite fond of:
- cut
- sort
- uniq
- grep
- tail
- head
The last one is what I wanted to comment on. Not all greps support -B. It is a GNU invention. HPUX and Solaris (at least up to 8), for instance, do not ship with it. When I have to work to make one of these do what I want, I tend to revert back to Perl.
| [reply] |
I encounter this problem very frequently on Solaris. My solution is just to install the GNU tools and modify my $PATH accordingly. http://www.sunfreeware.com is a real beaut. If you have a Solaris box without sufficient privileges to do this or an agreeable sysadmin, you have my sympathy.
| [reply] |
I also use "sed" quite often and "awk" is nice if you want to grab columns out of a file. Just last week someone told me the letters in awk stand for the names of the developers (Aho, Weinberger, Kernighan).
I actually have command lines about two lines long that I use to work out things like for example which IP addresses are connected to my machine's SMTP port sorted by number of connections. I just haven't gotten around to writting a script or setting up a shell alias to do it yet.
I played with a perl shell once but it didn't feel right (ie I wasn't used to it yet, years of BASH have me in their grasp). Also the control characters (^U, ^A, ^E, etc) didn't work on the main server I use at work (but did on my desktop). I don't remember the shell name but I think it supported commands something like " ls -1 | s/aaa/bbb/g " and more.
| [reply] |
In that case I'd use awk to solve this problem.
| [reply] |