pattern replacement

[Matthew Seaman]

On Sun, Jul 04, 2004 at 08:22:02PM -0500, Vulpes Velox wrote:
> On Sun, 4 Jul 2004 17:51:22 -0500
> Jon Drews <jon.drews at gmail.com> wrote:

> >  Sed is useful for this. Here are some good tutorials on it:
> > 
> > Common threads: Sed by example:
> > http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-sed1.html
> > http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-sed2.html
> > http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-sed3.html
> 
> Cool, thanks... I working on something with a fix using head, grep,
> and cut :)
> 
> Basically grep -n for #include or whatehet, pipe it into
> head -n 1 it, and then head -n (pervious number cut and minus one> the
> file, then >> the include into it, and the this is where I am stuck...
> I can't find a way to cat everything after a certian line number
> out :/

sed(1) is good for replacing one word with another one -- but the OP
was talking about implementing something more along the lines of what
#include does with the C pre-processor.  sed can certainly help to do
that, but it's not a complete solution.

There's in fact plenty of different ways to do this sort of thing.
Some more practical than others.  (I once, a long time ago, wrote a
website using server-side includes to implement a templating system,
using 'lynx -dump' to get apache to process the source files.)

Probably the official way to do this sort of thing is to use a macro
pre-processor.  cpp(1) has often been used, but it is pretty C
specific.  m4(1) is the general purpose solution but it's got a lot of
capabilities and is intimidating to the beginner:

    % cat foo
    This is the included text
    % cat bar
    Some stuff
    Some more stuff
    include(`foo')
    A last chunk of stuff
    % m4 < bar 
    Some stuff
    Some more stuff
    This is the included text
    
    A last chunk of stuff

	Cheers,

	Matthew

-- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                       26 The Paddocks
                                                      Savill Way
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey         Marlow
Tel: +44 1628 476614                                  Bucks., SL7 1TH UK
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