Wolfgang Gill writes.... > > Thanks for that, it was EXACTLY was I was looking for. I'd also assume that > these commands and functions can be used in scripting?? Without any trouble? Well......not exactly. Or not really for writing scripts like I think you are talking about. However, you will see similarities in some of the commands and tools like 'sed.' I think it has something to do with 'ed' commands, which vi is a frontend, or something........Someone with more history info can probably explain better. But similarities in sed like s/STRING1/STRING2/g are the exact same as if you do them on the command prompt in vi. But only a few of them. And most metacharacters are respected. I may [WILL] get some argument here but......10 years ago the way to write scripts was learn awk, sed, and as many unix commands as you can and put them together in a bourne shall script and run it. But if you are starting out today, and want to write some scripts, you will do yourself well to learn Perl. NOW, before I get attacked here......that in NO WAY suggests that ignore the VERY useful commands like grep, cut, sort, tr, sed, find, and all the useful redirects, pipes, etc. However, Perl can do pretty much anything that the awk/sed combination can do, and you can learn Perl in about the same time as learning both sed and awk. PLUS, anything you cannot do with a Perl command, you can invoke a shell command and pull the results back into Perl to process. AND.....Perl makes string parsing a piece of cake, whereas it's a NIGHTMARE doing much of it with just regular unix commands piped together. And Perl is VERY portable, and here to stay. -- Jay Crews jpc@xxxxxxxxxxxx -- Psyche-list mailing list Psyche-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/psyche-list
