Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-ncis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!nosc!humu!uhccux!bmartin
From: bmartin@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Brian Martin)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Mac Interface v. "Command Line" interface debates
Keywords: regular expressions
Message-ID: <2969@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu>
Date: 8 Jan 89 03:14:37 GMT
References: <15213@mimsy.UUCP> <958@esquire.UUCP>
Reply-To: bmartin@uhccux.UUCP (Brian Martin)
Organization: University of Hawaii
Lines: 58

In article <958@esquire.UUCP> sbb@esquire.UUCP (Stephen B. Baumgarten) writes:
>In article <15213@mimsy.UUCP> folta@tove.umd.edu.UUCP writes:
>>[ No parallel on the Mac to Unix pipes ]
>>[This lack] cannot really be answered, except by concentrating power
>>in individual applications, so that tasks commonly performed with
>>multiple programs can be done in one program.  This solution is not as
>>elegant as pipes, but Mac word processors do everything that you would
>>have to use about 3 nroff pre-processors to do.
>

There have been a number of times where I've wanted to drop into
a command line interface and type a little Bourne/Korn-shell style script
to do a global change to a group of files. For example, before shipping
a group of nroff source files to the Mac, for conversion to Word,
I run a sed script which replaces EOL chars with SPACE chars when necessary,
leaving the blank lines unchanged (so they can be interpreted as paragraph
marks). Or I might want to change a filename suffix from ".l" to ".c",
with a script such as

	for i in *.l
	do mv $i `basename $i .l`.c
	done

Or how about 

	grep '^Subject.*RSG' * */*

Really quite simple on a UNIX box, but difficult on the Mac.

I also rely heavily on the ability to pipe data between existing tools
such as awk, sort, uniq, sed and join for the analysis of large free-text
databases.


Changing the subject a bit--why aren't regular expressions supported on
Mac word processing or database products?  Here, I'm referring to the
full complement offered by programs such as egrep. It would seem pretty
simple to port the "re_comp" and "re_exec" routines from the UNIX system
to a Mac program. (The command "mac regex" gets you a short synopsis of
these routines.) Some of the software I've developed in the past has
used these routines liberally.

--- Brian
====
    Brian K. Martin, M.D.
    Department of Psychiatry
    John A. Burns School of Medicine
    University of Hawaii
      and
    Martin Information Systems, Ltd.
    1103 9th Ave., Suite 203
    Honolulu, Hawai`i 96816-2403
    Voice (808) 733-2003
    Fax (808) 733-2011

ARPA: uhccux!bmartin@nosc.MIL
UUCP: {uunet,dcdwest,ucbvax}!ucsd!nosc!uhccux!bmartin
INTERNET: bmartin@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu