Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

i would work hp-ux script on an AIX, and i have a pb with wc -l command, on AIX this command made a space on output and hp not. And I would like use an alias or a function in order to remove this space on output without change code.


thanks for your help.

$ cat profile.ksh | wc -l
91

Echoing a variable or other expression without quoting it will remove any leading and trailing whitespace.

Code:

echo `wc -l <profile.ksh`

Usually echo `backticks` is mainly seen in really horrible newbie code, but the whitespace normalization is a useful and in this case desired side effect which makes this a legitimate use IMHO.

Note the use of redirection to avoid the Useless Use of Cat.

Are you sure about the AIX spacing issue, though? The situation where you usually see this is when you use wc -l file instead of wc -l <file (but then of course you get the file name also).

Hi, thanks you for your response.

Yes, i have this space on AIX, and not on HP-UX. I don't know why ?

right, with echoing , i don't have space , and with a sed too ( cat profile.ksh | wc -l | sed 's/ //g)

do you know how i can realise this change with an alias or function, in order to not change code ?? ( i have many shell scripts)

(wc -l profile.ksh | perl -ne 's/(.)/ord($1)/eg;print'
32323232323256523211211411110210510810146107115104)
32 are space.

Thanks in advance

Changing it with a function sounds perilous, but I suppose it could be done.

Code:

wc () {
  /usr/bin/wc "$@" | sed 's/ //g'
}

If your wc is not in /usr/bin, you will need to modify this. If it's at different paths on AIX and on HP-UX, you will have to parametrize that, too. Maybe something like this:

Code:

case `uname -s` in
  AIX) wc=/tru/blu/wc;;
  HP-UX) wc=/ick/opt/we/are/weird;;
esac

wc () {
  $wc "$@" | sed 's/ //g'
}

I don't have ready access to AIX or HP-UX systems so I can only guess what they print for "uname -s".

Era, I thank you for your helps.

it 's ok