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From: ado@elsie.UUCP (Arthur David Olson)
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Subject: comm '! sort file1' '! sort file2'
Message-ID: <6846@elsie.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 22-Sep-86 10:20:58 EDT
Article-I.D.: elsie.6846
Posted: Mon Sep 22 10:20:58 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 22-Sep-86 21:10:36 EDT
Organization: NIH-LEC, Bethesda, MD
Lines: 30

I regularly want to run "comm" on a pair of unsorted files.  So I ended up
writing a shell script to do the job, the guts of which (simplified for the
purposes of this article) is:

	tmp=/tmp/\#scomm.$$
	sort "$1" > $tmp
	sort "$2" | comm $tmp -
	rm $tmp

All fine and dandy.  But then I got to thinking. . .that what I'd *really*
like to be able to do is use a command like

	comm '! sort file1' '! sort file2'

(where the space after the '!' should be your clue that I use csh) and have
comm do the dirty work.

And then I got to thinking. . .that if fopen turned
	fopen("!whatever", "r")
calls into
	popen("whatever", "r")
calls (with other changes as necessary), then what I'd like to see happen
with the "comm" command would happen generally.

Comments?
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