SPUG:Best One-Liners and Scripts for UNIX

[SPUG-list-owner]

On Fri, Apr 18, 2003 at 06:33:02AM -0700, Brian Hatch wrote:
> 
> 
> > Ouch! That's too complicated for my "Minimal Perl" tastes.
> 
> I just gave you my starting point - of course we can
> play with things.

I'm not criticizing, just exploring simpler approaches.
 
> > How about the following as a one-liner to type directly to the shell,
> > 	perl -wlna -e 'print "@F[3,1,2]"' file
> 
> I use perl one liners on the command line all the time.  But
> when I use one too much, then I put it in a function so I don't
> need to any more.  That's the whole point.

Agreed.
 
> > unshift @F, "(No zeroth field! first is #1)";
> 
> Are you nuts?  That was the whole point of using perl!  Of course
> the first field should be field #0.  Anything else is unperlish.

Huh???

My point was that it's more *Human-ish* to let the user specify the
first field as field #1 (like Awk does), regardless of what Perl uses
internally.  TMTOWTDI!
 
> I also wanted the use of the '..' operator - you're not going
> to take that away, are you?.
>
> Brian Hatch                  Language, it's a virus.

I'm not trying to take *anything* away from you, just improvising
alternative approaches that bring out other trade-offs, that people
might find interesting.  Your solution (which I can't see right now,
but I think I remember the essentials) had the benefit of being
pre-processed by a shell, so the dots in 1..2 would be seen in the
initial parsing of the Perl program.  With the pure-perl approach
I've taken, I believe an eval would be required to handle the range
specifier (since it resides in a variable), and I decided to draw
the line there.

-Tim
*------------------------------------------------------------*
|  Tim Maher (206) 781-UNIX  (866) DOC-PERL  (866) DOC-UNIX  |
|  CEO, JAWCAR ("Just Another White Camel Award Recipient")  |
|  tim at Consultix-Inc.Com  TeachMeUnix.Com  TeachMePerl.Com   |
*+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-*
|  Watch for my  Book: "Minimal Perl for Shell Programmers"  |
*------------------------------------------------------------*

----- End forwarded message -----

-- 

-Tim
*------------------------------------------------------------*
|  Tim Maher (206) 781-UNIX  (866) DOC-PERL  (866) DOC-UNIX  |
|  CEO, JAWCAR ("Just Another White Camel Award Recipient")  |
|  tim at Consultix-Inc.Com  TeachMeUnix.Com  TeachMePerl.Com   |
*+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-*
|  Watch for my  Book: "Minimal Perl for Shell Programmers"  |
*------------------------------------------------------------*