so, if i read your post correctly, with awk i can simulate sime functions of tail or head...
what about sort?
i must admint my knowledge of awk is fairly simple. i ave seen more complex ones, and im reading this website AWK Language Programming - Table of Contents
readnig the temporal file with awk and doing all the text procesing will decrease the number of binaries that have to be loaded (less i/o)

well. i see now, that perl is a best solution than bash. after all perl was made to process text right? :P
and perl has always been in my todo-list
the problem there would be to pipe the info to dzen
because the way dzen works, i need an never ending loop, so dzen dosnt die
is posible to do that piping from a perl script?
thanks for the link. is in my bookmarks now
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i know that. the problem is getting that info without using head | tail | cut or awk
spawning all those apps 4 times on the same text input file doesnt strike me as good performance


thanks for the replies !