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From: allbery@NCoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery KB8JRR/AA)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Shortest Perl and Awk programs
Message-ID: <1991Apr5.004600.17363@NCoast.ORG>
Date: 5 Apr 91 00:46:00 GMT
References: <9004@rsiatl.Dixie.Com>
Reply-To: allbery@ncoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery KB8JRR/AA)
Followup-To: comp.lang.perl
Organization: North Coast Public Access Un*x (ncoast)
Lines: 29

As quoted from <9004@rsiatl.Dixie.Com> by eeh@Dixie.Com (Ed Howland):
+---------------
| 	!0
| Is there anything shorter? Why does'nt just '1' (or any non-zero value) work?
+---------------

It probably matches the line number, so a given positive number N would match
only on line N.  (??? I have never understood all of awk completely; the
documentation for standard awk seems to leave a lot to be desired.  The new
awk and GNU awk may well be different there --- new awk has a book, at least.)

+---------------
| Also, does this hold true to perl? (Sorry I don't know perl well enough to
| to even guess.) What would be the shortest perl program to do this?
+---------------

"perl -pe ''" is the shortest, but may not be fair because it uses command
line arguments to "imply" a script.

'while(<>){print;}' is longer, as is 'print while$_=<>'.  Note that because
Perl is more general-purpose than awk, it doesn't do looping on input or
printing by default (except with -p).

++Brandon
-- 
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