[KLUG Programming] sorting, uniq'ing, and grepping

[Adam Williams]

> > I've got a process that I am trying to convert to a C program. In short, I 
> > need to combine two files into one, sort the resulting file, grab the unique 
> > lines, then pull out certain bits. I currently accomplish it this way (psuedo 
> > code):
> > cat file1 > newfile
> > cat file2 >> newfile
> > sort newfile > sortfile
> > uniq -uw7 sortfile > uniqfile
> > grep criteria1 uniqfile > importfile
> > grep criteria2 uniqfile > removefile
> > I then take the importfile and removefile and process them into LDIF, batch, 
> > and CSV files. I think I handle that part line by line once I sort, uniq, and 
> > grep.
> My solution would be done in perl.  Perl is absolutely wonderful at
> kerchunking input files which are formatted like csv and outputting them
> any way you want (and I mean ANY way).  I use perl to create ldif's in a
> cron job every night.  At first glance of this I thought just use a bash
> script.  You can accomplish the bash commands with the system(command);
> function.  I am unaware if Perl can be run from the other OS's though so
> Perl may not be the best solution.

I've installed Perl on WinY2k once.  Installing and configuring IIS was
more like fun.