Shell Programming and Scripting

You could try nawk, it may have an extended limit, I can't remember off hand. Otherwise:

1. Install gawk from sunfreeware.com
2. If 1 is not an option, rewite the affected part in perl.

Hi reborg,

I am not familiar with perl.
Can you help to create a similar code in perl ?

If you're going to be a UNIX/Linux scripting professional you're going to encounter lots of tools which were written decades ago with hard-coded limits that, by today's standards, are pathetic.

Your choices often boil down to: find a work-around or install more modern and less limited tools (such as the GNU utilities). Sometimes the work-around may entail writing a small utility of your own, in C.

As noted elsewhere in this thread you could install the GNU version of awk (called gawk) or you could use Perl. Both of these are written to avoid hard-coded limits wherever possible. They dynamically allocate memory and re-size their allocations and use the data types which are suitable for the underlying OS for numeric limits (so some things may be limited to 32-bit values on a 32-bit platform, etc).

Other work-arounds depend quite a bit on the problem at hand.

For example, in your code:

It might be possible for you to use grep filter out all of the lines that start with ** (a literal pair of asterisk characters) and feed just those through your (limited version of) awk. Obviously that will only work if the lines beginning with ** are smaller than this 4000 character limitation; and assuming that your version of grep can cope with longer lines.

Similar workarounds might be possible by prefiltering with sed or cut (if the stuff you cut out of the long lines isn't needed in the results), etc.

JimD
(former Linux Gazette AnswerGuy)

Hi,

First option of installation of newer version of awk is out because i cannot administer/control the whole system.
I tried to use grep "**" myinputfile but it seems to produce the whole input file again which is very strange

Can anybody provide me with a perl code which as a similar function as my awk code ?

Hi ,

Can any experts provide me with some advice on this perl code?

Hi ,

Anybody can help me with this by providing me a perl code?

Use a2p to convert awk to perl, ...

Code:

$[ = 1;                 # set array base to 1

while (<>) {
    chomp;      # strip record separator
    @Fld = split(' ', $_, 9999);
    if ($Fld[$#Fld] eq '2007' && $Fld[1] eq '**') {
        $LINE = $_;
    }
}

printf "%20s\n", $LINE;