Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!rutgers!usc!csun!csuna!abcscnge
From: abcscnge@csuna.csun.edu (Scott "The Pseudo-Hacker" Neugroschl)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Killing with awk vs. cut
Message-ID: <2153@csuna.csun.edu>
Date: 23 Aug 89 06:46:01 GMT
References: <20608@adm.BRL.MIL>
Reply-To: abcscnge@csuna.csun.edu (Scott Neugroschl)
Distribution: usa
Organization: CSU Northridge
Lines: 23

In article <20608@adm.BRL.MIL> ritter@cs.msstate.edu (Thomas H. Ritter) writes:
]In a recent article:
]All the solutions I saw used awk to get the second column of the
]ps listing. Why use such a general purpose tool for so simple
]a task? SystemV provides the cut command. eg.
]
]kill `ps -aux | fgrep -e -sleeper | egrep -v fgrep | cut -d" " -f5`

The problem with cut is that if you specify the delimiter with -d, then
consecutive delimiters will return empty strings: e.g.

a<blank><blank>b

where <blank> is a single blank:

cut -d" " -f2 returns an empty string, and cut -d" " -f3 returns the b

Scott
-- 
Scott "The Pseudo-Hacker" Neugroschl
UUCP:  ...!sm.unisys.com!csun!csuna.csun.edu!abcscnge
-- Beat me, Whip me, make me code in Ada
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