On Mon, 26 Jul 2004 07:47:23 -0500 (CDT), Adam Maloney <adam at whee.org> wrote: > Yeah! Awk rules! It is quite useful. A common use is to separate fields from a file that are separated by an arbitrary amount of whitespace. This would return the first and second columns with only a single space in between: awk '{print $1 " " $2}' > cat /etc/passwd | awk -F : '{ print $1 }' Actually, this would be the same with awk: awk -F : '{print $1}' < /etc/passwd Yours would win the "Useless Use of Cat Award": http://www.iki.fi/era/unix/award.html That page actually has a lot of useful tips and tricks for shell programming. I was previously unaware of this construct: </etc/passwd cut -d: -f1 I think most people use cat because it's more intuitive. You might use cat to view a file, then decide to grep it, and it's faster to simply add the pipe to grep on the end of the command line. Also, having the input redirection after the command feels backwards. Obviously, the only time it's really an issue is in a loop, in a frequently run script, or on a machine that has a slow CPU or is low on memory. -- David Phillips <david at acz.org> http://david.acz.org/ _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list