dattier(_at_)wwa(_dot_)com (David W. Tamkin) wrote:
[chop.chop]
It is far more efficient, if possible, to use one program than two with a
pipe; if formail can do the job alone with -X "", that's better than piping
formail to unblank.
| unblank is a small program I plinked out to get a line from stdin and send
| it to stdout as long as it wasn't blank.
You mean it's equivalent to
grep .
(note the period)?
Kool, just what I was looking for. Last night. :)
As I (believe I) stated in my original post, I'm not a UNIX guru. I kludge
around, (tho frequently use E/F/grep in MS-DOS implementations -- I've never
seen one that was a complete port of what is available on UNIX, or one that
was which was anywhere near efficient). My use of grep has pretty much been
limited to -i -c type searches for quick searching through raw text files.
Anything more complex, and I just toss off a program to do it.
I'll make note of the grep blank line finder (I had been thinking I'd have to
form a regular expression of "start of line" "end of line", and figured, it
only took 90 seconds to crank out a program to do it, why hassle?
SO the answer I'm getting is, there isn't anything unkosher about removing
the separator, and inserting a pre-made/whatever header. And there appear to
be several ways to do this already. Good.
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