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From: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr>
To: Gary Kline <kline@thought.org>
References: <20081130045944.GA94896@thought.org>
Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2008 11:47:29 +0200
In-Reply-To: <20081130045944.GA94896@thought.org> (Gary Kline's message of
	"Sat, 29 Nov 2008 20:59:51 -0800")
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Cc: FreeBSD Mailing List <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: for awk experts only.
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On Sat, 29 Nov 2008 20:59:51 -0800, Gary Kline <kline@thought.org> wrote:
> 	wordnet/wn prints the string "noun" out whereas I'd rather it simply
> 	printed "n."  Is there a way of making this substitution using awk?
> 	(I've never used awk except as a cmdline filter.)
>
> 	The following fails:
>
> wn foot -over |grep Overview |awk
> {if(!strcmp($3,"noun"))$3="n."; '{printf("%s %s\n", $4, $3);}}'
>
> 	If there are any shortcuts, please clue me in!

Don't do this with a long stream of if/else/.../else blocks.  AWK is a
pattern based rule-language.  You can apply different blocks of code to
lines that match patterns like this:

    $3 ~ /adjective/ { print $1,"adj." }
    $3 ~ /noun/      { print $1,"n." }
    $3 ~ /verb/      { print $1,"v." }