On Thu, February 21, 2008 4:14 pm, Barry Gershenfeld wrote: >>...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
... and I would recommend you skip sed and awk and go straight to perl, which does it all in a more intuituve way. -- Lan Barnes SCM Analyst Linux Guy Tcl/Tk Enthusiast Biodiesel Brewer -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
