hamilton@vine.OsbuSouth.Xerox.COM (Bruce Hamilton) (05/01/91)
I find Unix with its line orientation to be only a tiny bit more advanced than systems that only handle 80-column card images. I don't understand why the common utilities can't deal with pure character streams and treat \n the same as any other character -- that's what Xerox XDE and ViewPoint/GlobalView do. Instead of dealing with "lines", just print out a "context" consisting of a user-specified number of characters on either side of the search string. Anyhow, my immediate gripe is: grep doesn't work on undelimited files. I'd like to be able to use it to search my XDE mail file table-of-contents files. Those files consist of fixed-length, undelimited records. Should I use the perl "read" command to break up these files with a \n at the end of each record to make grep work? Any other ideas? Please copy me by e-mail, as I seldom read this newsgroup. Thanks, -- --Bruce Xerox Corp., 101 Continental Blvd. ESC1-611, El Segundo, CA 90245 BHamilton.LAX1B@Xerox.COM 213/333-3538