On Friday 15 February 2008 09:22, Per Jessen wrote:

Randall R Schulz wrote:

...

Please break yourself of the habit of doing "cat someFile |someCommand" Very, very few Unix command do not take file names as specifications of the input on which to operate.

"cat someFile |someCommand" is best replaced by:

"somecommand

Not really. The best is to let the program open the file. Then it knows that file's name, for one thing, and can include it in any diagnostics. As I said, only a very few commands don't take one or more file names as input specifications.

/Per Jessen, Zürich

Randall Schulz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Friday 15 February 2008 22:06, Aaron Kulkis wrote:

Randall R Schulz wrote:

...

On Friday 15 February 2008 09:22, Per Jessen wrote:

...

Randall R Schulz wrote:

...

Please break yourself of the habit of doing "cat someFile

|someCommand" Very, very few Unix command do not take file names | as

specifications of the input on which to operate.

"cat someFile |someCommand" is best replaced by:

"somecommand

Not really. The best is to let the program open the file. Then it knows that file's name, for one thing, and can include it in any diagnostics.

In the input redirection case, it's known as "stdin"

Which is neither here nor there. If you use the shell's redirection syntax, the _shell_ opens the file, not the program. Because the program did not open the file, it does not know its name and cannot issue that name in a diagnostic. Randall Schulz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Sunday 17 February 2008 19:58, Aaron Kulkis wrote:

Randall R Schulz wrote:

...

...

Which is neither here nor there. If you use the shell's redirection syntax, the _shell_ opens the file, not the program. Because the program did not open the file, it does not know its name and cannot issue that name in a diagnostic.

It issues the name "stdin"

Which is not the name of the file. Oy. RRS -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Randall R Schulz wrote:

On Friday 15 February 2008 08:51, David C. Rankin wrote:

...

Listmates,

Every time I run into sed, it's a fight. I'm trying to locate a " and then strip the quote and everything that follows from each line in a file called "myfile". I am obviously horribly confused with the ranges escaped parentheses and \1 remembered patterns. Surely sed can do this, but the trees are obscuring the forest. The lines I have in myfile are all like:

/home/icons-2/filename.gif">capital seal 1</A>

The problem I am having is that the " is in the middle of a 'word' so something like cat ~/tmp/myfile | sed 's/"\([0-9A-Za-z]*\)*/\1/' doesn't work. Something as simple as cat ~/tmp/myfile | sed 's/"//' does find the " and delete it, but how do I get rid of the rest of the line?

Sed is an odd duck, though mostly only in its more esoteric options and operations. This one's pretty simple:

sed -e 's/".*//' ~/tmp/myfile >resultFile

Hah..you came up with the same matching string I did!

Please break yourself of the habit of doing "cat someFile |someCommand"

Yes..it's called "gratuitous use of cat" as in cat infile | cat | cat | cat | somecommand which of course, can be done as $ somecommand < infile (any file which takes input from a pipe will ALSO take that same input from a '<' file-input redirection) or even (if $ somecommand < infile isn't "readable" enough): $ < infile command (Yes, that really DOES work!.. if you don't believe me, TRY IT!) <

Very, very few Unix command do not take file names as specifications of the input on which to operate.

And if they don't, file redirection always works. the only time cat | some_command is needed is $ cat file1 file2 file3 .... | some command OR $ cat -someflag file | command for example $ cat -n file | command so that every input line is preceded by a line number or $ cat -s file | command to reduce \n\n.... to a single \n

...

Help!

Calm down.

Heh! -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org