>...I want to be selective about which sigs are selected... >I thought about making a script that...greps certain lines >from the main sig file... >But my problem is that I need grep to cough up everything >between the two "%" delimiters, not just the matching line....
Learn awk, maybe? As your ideas become fancier, the programming effort you need also increases. This is the natural succession of things. While it may be possible to do it all with a shell script, more advanced programs can make it easier, more repeatable, and more modifiable. I see you've gotten sed into the act, and that's the kind of next step I'm talking about. When I climbed onto the Linux bandwagon, I figured I needed to progress through 3 levels. I see there are really 4. shell script sed awk perl And the reality was: I didn't realize shell scripts even counted as a language. But growing up with DOS Batch would make you think that. Shell scripts are good, and sometimes, a script is enough. Often, there's a script behind the final product anyway. sed was easy enough, but every time I went to use it, it would break down as soon as I needed to handle things that took more than one line. sed can work across line endings, but it ain't pretty. awk is like a real programming language. It has the guilty pleasures associated with string handling, and easy (or no?) data typing, and of course with regular expressions thrown in. awk solves most of my problems that are like the one you propose. perl, I never got to. I did read a "get started" article once, to sort of look into it, but didn't have a pressing need for it. At the perl level, you have python and php and as it happened I've also learned php. So...awk is where I would go with this. And if you want to try it (have you done any "programming language"s?), I'll help, as I suspect the onlookers would, too. Barry -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
