🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <6785@umd5.umd.edu> zben@umd5.umd.edu (Ben Cranston) writes:
>               Anyway, I tried to put in the fix and the awk call started
> complaining about "arguments too long".
>
> The structure is some preliminary options stuff then the construct:
>
> awk 'BEGIN {
> <7 pages of a pretty complicated awk program>
> }' $*
>
> and the additions pushed the size of the program over 8192 characters and
> evidently Unix has that limit on the size of "program arguments".
>
> Given the choice of purging the comments, throwing away the indentation,
> or shortening the variable names, I decided:

This is of course getting off the beaten path of PostScript, but heck,
we all love to write shells scripts, too.  And there's always something
cosmic when a principle (like shortening names) applies in such different
circumstances.

Anyway, what I tend to do in this situation is to make a temporary file
with the awk script in it, so you don't care how long it is.  Something
along these lines:

    #!/bin/sh
    cat > /tmp/awk.$$ << 'END_OF_SCRIPT'
    BEGIN {
      <7 pages of a pretty complicated awk program>
    }
    END_OF_SCRIPT
    awk -f /tmp/awk.$$ $*

But this method has its complications, too, of course.  I just thought I'd
toss in my $.02....

Cheers,
 Glenn
-- 
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