On Mon, Feb 16, 2009, David wrote: >Bill Campbell wrote: >> >> The ``swatch'' program, written in perl, does this by using the >> gnu-tail program via a pipe using. >> >> gtail --follow=name --lines=1 file1 file2 ... >> >> Use the source Luke. >> ... >That looks like the right tool for the job at hand. Looking at setting >up the configuration file, a stumbling block in my learning to program >is my lack of a good understanding of regular expressions. I have >started studying grep, sed and awk. It is a lot more fun to just write >little python programs and watch in amazement when they work as >expected. I have been avoiding this phase of learning.
Looking at other people's scripts can be very enlightening. When I started learning Xenix in 1982, there were about 2 books on the subjects, Jean Thompson's blue one, and I forget the other. I learned a lot by reading system administration scripts, once I figured out that these were working programs. One of the best books I've ever seen for general *nix text processing and use of tools is ``Unix Text Processing'' by Dougherty and O'Reilly. It has been out of print for years, but can probably be found through bookfinder.com It has lots on regular expressions, using ``vi'', etc. There is information on regular expressions in any book on python, perl, and other scripting languages. O'Reilly has a book ``Mastering Regular Expressions'' which is probably pretty good, but I have never read it. Bill -- INTERNET: b...@celestial.com Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC URL: http://www.celestial.com/ PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way Voice: (206) 236-1676 Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820 Fax: (206) 232-9186 About all I can say for the United States Senate is that it opens with prayer and closes with an investigation. -- Will Rogers _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
