sysctl with regex?

[Oliver Fromme]

Andrew Brampton wrote:
 > Today I was writing a script to read all the dev.cpu.?.temperature
 > sysctl OIDs. I was parsing them using a simple grep, but it occurred
 > to me it might be better if sysctl supported some form of regexp. For
 > example instead of typing:
 > sysctl -a | grep dev.cpu.*.temperature
 > 
 > I could write:
 > sysctl dev.cpu.*.temperature
 > 
 > which would display all the OIDs that match dev.cpu.*.temperature.
 > This is better than grep because when I issue a "sysctl -a" the
 > program retrieves many variables that I am not interested in (which
 > later get filtered by grep).

I'm not sure such a feature is really necessary.
What's wrong with this approach?

$ sysctl dev.cpu | grep temperature

When you need that in a script, there's an even more
elegant way to do it:

NCPU=`sysctl -n hw.ncpu`
OIDS=`jot -w dev.cpu.%d.temperature $NCPU 0`
sysctl $OIDS

There's no need to use "sysctl -a".  After all, the
"UNIX way" of doing things is to combine the existing
tools instead of duplicate features in many tools.

Best regards
   Oliver

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