Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!fernwood!apple!agate!violet.berkeley.edu!pete
From: pete@violet.berkeley.edu (Pete Goodeve)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: PIPEs
Message-ID: <1990Nov6.074953.29178@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 6 Nov 90 07:49:53 GMT
References: <6984@sugar.hackercorp.com> <1990Nov5.040638.6580@agate.berkeley.edu> <6991@sugar.hackercorp.com>
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In  <6991@sugar.hackercorp.com> (5 Nov),
Peter da Silva (peter@sugar.hackercorp.com) writes:
> In article <1990Nov5.040638.6580@agate.berkeley.edu> pete@violet.berkeley.edu (Pete Goodeve) writes:
|>  and the choice of '.' as [a UNIX shell metacharacter] is a real pain!.
>
> Huh? "." isn't a UNIX shell metacharacter. What are you talking about?
>
Heh!  (Kaff..!) Well, see -- that just goes to show how confusing it
all is! (:-))  Of course it's not a SHELL metacharacter; I was thinking of
all the OTHER kinds of regular expressions under unix.  Sorree!

|>  In particular, Mat uses patterns to scan the contents
|>  of TEXT files (though it does things with filenames too); the "slices" I
|>  was talking about are used for rearrangement of the matched lines for
|>  output.
>
> Like \1, \2, \3 and so on in "ed" style regular expressions? What's wrong
> with using backslash for that... it doesn't conflict with UNIX anything.

Nothing at all really, except that the '^' was a natural for marking a
"slice point" in a pattern, and I economized in special characters by using
it in replacement templates as well.

> (and I have no problem quoting my "sed" arguments)
I think I've satisfied myself that this overloading/quoting question is
a non-issue after all.

> (speaking of which, how does MAT differ functionally from sed?)
Um, tough question.  All I know is I got frustrated trying to make sed
do something I wanted a few months ago, so I hauled out the Mat code again
to make it do everything *I* needed.  Of course the obvious difference is
that it uses Amiga style pattern matching, rather than ed.  It has a much
less complex syntax than sed -- which to be frank I found thoroughly
intimidating.  On the other hand it lacks things like address ranges.

>
>
> [.....]
> 1.Ram Disk:> execute fo#?
> EXECUTE: Can't open fo#?
Consistency WOULD be nice, wouldn't it..?

                                    -- Pete --