Date: Sat, 27 Mar 2010 01:51:01 -0500 From: Dan Nelson <dnelson@allantgroup.com> To: Manish Jain <invalid.pointer@gmail.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Question about expr Message-ID: <20100327065100.GA4806@dan.emsphone.com> In-Reply-To: <4BAE5627.5010802@gmail.com> References: <4BAE5627.5010802@gmail.com>
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In the last episode (Mar 27), Manish Jain said: > I am used to the normal GNU-version of expr (also available on Solaris) > and much prefer it over the FreeBSD version. The GNU version allows > internal commands like length, substring and others which make it much > easier to work with. Is there any way I can replace FreeBSD's native expr > with the GNU version ? Since I believe expr does not normally ship as a > shell-builtin, I don't think the shell can of much help in the matter. > > Actually, I think it might not be a bad idea to place a port of GNU-expr > in the ports directory. This would allow a lot a scripts to be readily > portable to multiple environments. It's part of the coreutils package. If you install the sysutils/coreutils port, you can symlink /bin/expr over to it (or make a copy). I don't know if it's 100% compatible with BSD expr, though, so you may end up breaking scripts in the base system. -- Dan Nelson dnelson@allantgroup.com
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