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From: wtr@moss.ATT.COM (3673,ATTT)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: cut.c
Message-ID: <3615@cbnewsl.ATT.COM>
Date: 12 Jan 90 14:16:34 GMT
References: <5067@ast.cs.vu.nl> <18787@bcsaic.UUCP>
Sender: nntp@cbnewsl.ATT.COM
Reply-To: wtr@moss.ATT.COM (Bill Rankin)
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Lines: 41

In article <18787@bcsaic.UUCP> paula@bcsaic.UUCP (Paul Allen) writes:
>In article <5067@ast.cs.vu.nl> ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) writes:
>>
>>I treid using cut yesterday to extract the third column from a crc listing
>>like this:
>>
>>65261   8510 alloc.c
>>09176   7432 break.c
>>53152    990 const.h
>>
>>I could not find any combination of -d and -i flags to convince it to consider
>>a run of spaces as a separator.  I eventually did it with columns, but I
>>think it ought to work with fields as well.  Does anyone (e.g., the author)
>>know how to do this?
>
>My experience with cut(1) on Suns and Ultrix is that a run of delimiter
>characters is always a series of empty fields. ...

>Does the System V cut(1) have an
>option to treat runs of delimiters as a single delimiter?

>Paul Allen

Nope.  SysV behaves the same way.  (At least our SysVr3.1 Vaxen do)

A method to get around this problem is to use tr(1) to remove all
double spaces:

        cat file | tr -s ' ' ' ' | cut -d' ' -f????

Sorry, but I don't have a minix system in front of me, and have
only played with one briefly.  Does minix have tr(1)?

Hope this helps,

-bill.
--
=====================================================================
Bill Rankin				email address:	att!moss!wtr
was: Bell Labs, Whippany NJ				att!bromo!wtr
now: AT&T Federal Systems, Burlington NC  (919) 228 3673 (cornet 291)