> well. awk is nothing if not a glue language. Sorry but I can't possibly call awk a glue language. A glue language requires to combine the I/O of other programs and to generally muck around with that data. I just checked the man page of Solaris 2.9 awk, and it can't even crank up another program or pipe into/out of something. Apart from some bare basics, it's useless (true for most of the *ix Solaris command line programs, though they did manage to make "true" useful). Awk is a text processing language - text in, do some search/replace-type operations, text out. You use awk to be glued into something, not as glue. GNU awk is more powerful, but it wouldn't be your first choice of glue, and gluing with it is still more trouble than it's worth.
Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is possibly list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
