Re: [mu TECH] wc : faster, more gnarly

From: Alfie Costa (agcosta@gis.net)
Date: Tue Mar 21 2000 - 03:25:39 CET


On 19 Mar 00, at 10:40, Michele Andreoli <mulinux@sunsite.auc.dk> wrote:

> > [ "$c" ] && charlist=`ls -Uo "$@" | awk '{ printf "%s ", $4 }'`
>
> My problem is: you use awk, here, but shell is enough
>
> set -- $string ; echo $4

Maybe we think alike -- I attempted something like that the other day, after
forgetting some details, but the problem doesn't seem to be a true problem
after all. Example: suppose there's two files in a directory, 'foo1' and
'foo2'.

Just now I forget how the exact 'ls -Uo' output ought to look, and am typing
this in Pegasus/Win95 where it is inconvenient to check, but probably if we do
an 'ls -Uo *' of this dir it should look sort of like this:

drwxrwxr-x igor monsters 222 Oct 31 1999 foo1
drwxrwxr-x igor monsters 897 Nov 11 1999 foo2

Whatever it really looks like, the important thing is that column 4 has the
file size, the rest doesn't effect the program. Piping this output to
`awk '{ printf "%s ", $4 }'` produces:

222 897

...which is the thing desired, but piping that same 'ls -Uo' output to
`set -- $string ; echo $4` would result in:

222

...because the 'ls -Uo *' output is on multiple lines, which 'awk' is happy
with, but which 'set' doesn't like. With a single line of input, they both do
the same thing, (which is confusing, maybe I should write better comments), but
for multiple lines, 'set' and 'awk' are different.

Anyway, it's good you mentioned this, because looking at that 'set -- $string'
line, it shows how I didn't need any of that "set dummyoption" stuff. That is,
before, to protect a leading hyphen from 'set' I had written:

eval set dummyoption ${opts:--}
shift

...but now it's plain enough that this is simpler:

eval set - ${opts:--}

So, this has been educational for me, and I'll e-mail you 'crudewc' with that
line changed, and a better comment. (Doesn't seem a big enough change to put
on the list...)

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