Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!uflorida!haven!adm!xadmx!ritter@cs.msstate.edu From: ritter@cs.msstate.edu (Thomas H. Ritter) Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions Subject: Re: Killing with awk vs. cut Message-ID: <20608@adm.BRL.MIL> Date: 15 Aug 89 15:30:53 GMT Sender: news@adm.BRL.MIL Lines: 29 In a recent article: > From: Tricia Gardenhire> Subject: Summarize: killing with awk and grep > > more about how grep, and awk work now. Any way, to summarize, the > easiest way to do this was: > > kill `ps -aux | fgrep -e -sleeper | egrep -v fgrep | awk '{print $2}'` > > Most other ideas were similar, but were more involved shell scripts. I agree that this is an easy and convient solution, but one thing struck me as I read people's postings to your question. All the solutions I saw used awk to get the second column of the ps listing. Why use such a general purpose tool for so simple a task? SystemV provides the cut command. eg. kill `ps -aux | fgrep -e -sleeper | egrep -v fgrep | cut -d" " -f5` This solution uses a program that is considerably cheaper in overhead than awk. (awk is an interpreted language) I know that some 4.XBSD systems don't provide cut. But, I think if a nice tool is available use it. (portablilty aside) Tom Ritter ritter@cs.msstate.edu