Date: Sun, 14 Jun 1998 22:42:49 -0400 From: Dan Welch <WELCHDW@truth.wofford.edu> To: sue@welearn.com.au Cc: QUESTIONS@FreeBSD.ORG, WELCHDW@truth.wofford.edu Subject: RE: what to learn? Message-ID: <980614224249.20a0b063@mail.wofford.edu>
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>> I have a large text file (2-3 megs) with numbers at the beginning of l> lines. Currently I'm reading through this file, checking that the > numbers go in sequence, detecting errors but not fixing. This file > has a long history of cutting and pasting without always updating > the codes properly :-( > > Surely there's a better way, a good incentive for a bit of learning > with a practical application. I dabbled with perl a tiny bit a long > time ago and could relearn but maybe there's another tool that's > more appropriate? Regular expressions make this task relatively easy. Perl has that in abundance, as do sed, awk, and other tools that predate perl. My strong opinion is that the best way to learn what you need would be to work through the tutorial at the beginning of THE AWK PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE bootk by Aho, Kernighan, and Weinberger. The book is a series of extremely practical serious problem solving examples for just such problems as you describe here. While there are very good books for the other tools, this one makes awk exceptionally valuable and effective. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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