In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
tereglow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>On Mar 15, 1:47 am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Alex Martelli) wrote:
>> tereglow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>>
>>>grep^MemTotal /proc/meminfo | awk '{print $2}'
>>
>> If you would indeed do that, maybe it's also worth learning something
>> more about the capabilities of your "existing" tools, since
>>
>> awk '/^MemTotal/ {print $2}' /proc/meminfo
>>
>> is a more compact and faster way to perform exactly the same task.
>>
>> (You already received a ton of good responses about doing this in
>> Python, but the "pipegrepinto awk instead of USING awk properly in the
>> first place!" issue has been a pet peeve of mine for almost 30 years
>> now, and you know what they say about old dogs + new tricks!-).
>
>I had no idea you could do that. Thanks for the tip, I need to start
>reading that awk/sed book collecting dust on my shelf!
Your other option is to completely abandon awk/sed. I started writing
stuff like this in Turbo Pascal back in the early 80s because there
simply wasn't anything like awk/sed available for CP/M. In the 90s, when
I needed to do similar things, I used Perl. Now I use Python.
>From my POV, there is really no reason to learn the advanced shell
utilities.
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