I received three responses, the first and simplest wins my award for... simplicity. The other two does essentially the same thing. Again this list proves its superiority - Thanx to the responses, including any that I have not received yet due to net-lag. Does anybody on this list still remember the word lag? Bertrand_Hutin@notes.amdahl.com try this: nawk '/\\$/{sub(".$","");printf "%s",$0;next};{print}' /etc/printers.conf | grep $PRINTER "JULIAN, JOHN C. (AIT)" <jj2195@sbc.com> script to remove escaped new-line #!/bin/sh # stripeol sed -e ':start /\\$/{ N s/\\\n// b start } $1 ----end of script---- it will accept input as either a file on the command line or by piping ie: cat /etc/printers.conf | stripeol or: stripeol /etc/printers.conf Marcos Assis Silva <root@songa-monga.sercomtel.com.br> I remember having to deal with that once, and I used something in the line of: nawk '{if (substr($NF,length($NF))=="\\") printf("%s", substr($0,1,length($0)-1)); else printf $0}' One should have performance concerns when resorting to it and if the data volume to be processed is worth notice, but if not for the performance issue, it should do the job. My original question contained one lie (due to me not THINKING); I quote it for referential purposes: >From: Johannes J Hartzenberg [mailto:jhartzen@csc.com] >Sent: Friday, September 21, 2001 10:08 AM >To: sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org >Subject: Parse files w lines ending with escaped new-line > > >Hi, > >I want to parse /etc/printers.conf in a script, specifically to get the >description field for a specified printer, along the lines of > > >cat /etc/printers.conf | reformat | grep "^${PRINTER}:" | awk -F: 'print >($3)' > >a normal grep xxx /etc/printers.conf appears to work but it only returns >the first line and the line following each hit. > >Strangely enough, cat -e /etc/printers.conf doesn't admit to finding ANY >end-of-line >characters!!! > >How do I do the "reformat" bit in the command to turn each entry in the >/etc/printers.conf file into a single line with fields colon-separated and >records separated by newline? > >Thanx in advance, > _Johan P.S. Allow me a small flame: I reply to many questions, but very seldomly see any Summaries. This list is supposed to be a shared learning medium (In addition to assisting us all out of difficult spots). If people took the time to help you, at least take the time to Summarise. _______________________________________________ sunmanagers mailing list sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org http://www.sunmanagers.org/mailman/listinfo/sunmanagersReceived on Tue Sep 25 09:50:47 2001
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Thu Mar 03 2016 - 06:42:25 EST