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Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 13:52:23 -0400
From: Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>
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Subject: Re: Computer Language Shootout
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Date: 2003-07-21T13:52:23-04:00
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tmoran@acm.org wrote:
>   I suppose some people have probably tried to use a pliers to tighten
> the head bolts on their car's engine.  The relevant phrase is "Use
> the right tool for the job".

Huh? It was a plain old text file, it just happened to have long
lines. What makes the standard text processing utilities be the
wrong tool? If you really care, it was a .newsrc file, and for
some neewsgroups the reading pattern had been such that the lines
were a very long sequence of comma-separated pairs of dash-separated
numbers.

How short does a line have to be for sed or awk to be the right tool?
Fortunately for me, I was using GNU versions, and they remained the
right tool.