[Techtalk] real life kewl text-processing and regexps samples wanted

[Conor Daly]

On Fri, Jan 09, 2004 at 08:19:21PM -0500 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
Brenda Bell thought:
> 
> I don't have any examples, but the cut command is one of my
> favorites:
> 
>     cat test.txt | cut -d= -f1
> 
> Will print the first "field" of a file where fields are delimited
> by = and "records" are delimited by new lines.

I know I'm replying 2 weeks later but still...

One thing that bothers me with cut is when I do 

ls -l | cut -f6-8 -d' ' 

to extract the date from a file list and cut goes and counts spaces and
gives me my UID and 2 spaces instead of the date fields.  I know cut is
doing what it's told but I want it to treat any whitespace as a single
space.  Anyone know how I should do that?  Currently I'll do:

ls -l | sed -e 's/ \{1,\}/ /g' | cut -f6-8 -d' ' 

where:

sed -e 's/ \{1,\}/ /g'
           ^^^^^^

means "replace a space followed by 1 or more spaces with just one space" 

Conor
-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at oceanfree.net>

Domestic Sysadmin :-)
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