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From: jason@hpcnoe.UUCP (Jason Zions)
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Subject: Re: comm '! sort file1' '! sort file2'
Message-ID: <830003@hpcnoe.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 24-Sep-86 17:27:28 EDT
Article-I.D.: hpcnoe.830003
Posted: Wed Sep 24 17:27:28 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 30-Sep-86 20:31:44 EDT
References: <6846@elsie.UUCP>
Organization: HP Colorado Networks Division
Lines: 41

> / ado@elsie.UUCP (Arthur David Olson) /  8:20 am  Sep 22, 1986 /
> I regularly want to run "comm" on a pair of unsorted files.
> 	[ ... ]
> 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.

You can do this more easily. Create a program, bang.c, the name of whose
executable is  !  . All this sucker does is a mktemp, then executes the
rest of the command line as a command, redirecting stdout into the temporary
file. !'s output is just the name of the temporary file.

Admittedly, it's a bit dirty; the file isn't deleted, so /tmp could fill up
quick. Perhaps ! could fork; the child sleeps for 5 minutes, then unlinks
the temporary file. This depends on comm (or whatever) opening the temporary
file soon enough. You could make the 5 minutes into 1 hour and be pretty sure.

I would select some character other than ! as a command name; perhaps @. Not
sacred to any shell that I know of.

How's that?
--
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Jason Zions				Hewlett-Packard
Colorado Networks Division		3404 E. Harmony Road
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