Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cbmvax!uunet!convex!usenet
From: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: extract -- field-oriented grep and expr
Message-ID: <1991Mar14.063047.3015@convex.com>
Date: 14 Mar 91 06:30:47 GMT
References: <1991Mar11.231636.13429@mav.com>
Sender: usenet@convex.com (news access account)
Reply-To: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen)
Organization: CONVEX Software Development, Richardson, TX
Lines: 19
Nntp-Posting-Host: pixel.convex.com

From the keyboard of roger@mav.com (Roger Droz):
:Never underestimate the power of self-modifying code!  Take a simple perl
:three instruction perl loop, and add a user interface and you have the
:following "database extraction" filter, ready to take its place along
:side cut, paste, sort, and grep.
:
:The enclosed shar contains "extract", which effectively does an expr(1)
:on one or more fields in a file, sending lines the meet the condition to
:stdout.
:
:Example:
:	extract -t: 3n '>' 700 '&' 3n '<' '900' /etc/passwd
:
:    Extract those lines from /etc/passwd with the 3rd colon-delimited
:    field (user-id) between 700 and 900.

I truly hate to be the one to say this, but how is this better than awk?

--tom