UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I tried the quotes but that didn't do it. I guess no big deal. I found an alternate way of doing it which I'm not totally happy with... but I'm using awk to split the records, attach a delimiter after each field, like a '/' and then process the 'new' file with the delimiter again via the exec/read command. This works but if the user already typed '/' in the file then it might give me some grief which I'll deal with later. In this case any character, '\/|& @#& blanks *', is valid so I have to pick a delimiter that would most likely be least used...

Thanks to everyone for helping out. I know now that the read command always ignores spaces and concatenate contiguous spaces to a single space.

by the way, why doesn't this work given my premise that any of these characters are valid (+-\/ )...?

echo $desc | grep -Eq '^[0-9a-zA-Z+\-\/][0-9a-zA-Z+\-\/][0-9a-zA-Z ]{2,50}$'

The department description gets flagged as soon as it hits this condition.

Gianni

Nevermind. I finally read up on egrep and grep from the man pages and everything I wanted to know is in there for what I wanted to do.

Searching previous posts also helped me to figure out stuff so thanks to everyone.

Gianni

This new format website doesn't work with Netscape 4.7?Everything was jumbled up.

Just an fyi. Don't use the grep command to do this 'comparison' check (last post). It was only an experiment. You can do the same with an if-then statement.

I found that when I converted all my grep statements to a straight if-then syntax, I could validate 1000 records in maybe 4 seconds...When I left it as a grep comparison, the way I initially coded the program, it took a very long long time....up to 5 minutes depending on the number of records I had to validate.

I was just experimenting with the grep command and thought it may help but it was worse. Thought I'd just share this thought w/everyone.

Gianni

Not sure why it looked funky in netscape 4.7 - I just tried it and it looks fine, at least in the silk road skin..

This thread started out talking about how to read every line from a file and split each one into several parts and store each part in a separate variable, but the last few posts have been about finding certain lines in a file using the grep command..

I'm just curious what you're trying to do with the grep command and if-then statements...

My comment about the Netscape 4.7 is valid though. It looks fine but when you hit 'New Reply', this box ("Your Reply") is a tiny little square in the corner of area and all the buttons for the vB Code are lined up along the edge in that area...weird. I would always have to flip to IE to be able to type any replies.

In any case, my test was to see if grep would be better at handling certain tests for 'existence' and it was definitely slower.

As I started to remove the grep and replace the validation with an if-then statement, my script would finish faster and faster until it just seemed to scroll by/dump the results instanteously...

I changed lines like below. I have many other test conditions that are not this simple, but this is an example:

echo $catcd | grep -Eq '^[[:digit:]][[:digit:]][[:digit:]]$'
if [[ $? -ne 0 ]]; then
...
fi

to:

if [[ $catcd != +([0-9]) ]]; then
..
fi

Your point is valid and that's why I didn't continue this post because you guys answered my questions about the reading of the records, etc. I just wanted to revisit this post to say the thing about the Netscape and tell everyone what I found in my little test. I was surprised at the difference in time of execution (between 3-4 seconds to 5-8 minutes for 1000 records) between grepping and just using an if-then in this case, that's all. I didn't think the time would be so far apart. It was almost 1 sec for each record to be validated in some cases...

Gianni

Avoiding external programs is the the key to fast shell scripts. Even if you need several statements to eliminate the use of an external program, it is almost always a win.

I am typing this reply on an NT system using Netscape 4.7 and I don't see any problem. My work PC is wimpy and I prefer to use Netscape 4.7 where I can because it does not require a lot of resources. I do have my style set to "vbPortal". Maybe you just need another style setting?