Re: another command line parm puzzle.

From:
"John B. Matthews" <nospam@nospam.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.help
Date:
Mon, 09 Jun 2008 10:02:06 -0400
Message-ID:
<nospam-E7E9CA.10020609062008@news-server.woh.rr.com>
In article <87bp44pr14cahlh13itqgn8q61v5tmb7rp@4ax.com>,
 Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> wrote:

On Sun, 08 Jun 2008 12:17:03 GMT, Roedy Green
<see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted
someone who said :

But if I put something more complicated like:

java com.mindprod.example.TestParms
"/dp/([0-9A-Z]+)(/ref=[0-9a-z_]+)?\"\>Kindle"

Then there is no output because the > is treated as a redirection.


The roots of the problem are two:

1. the people who write command processors are tinkerers. They invent
syntactic kludges as needed. There is no uniform scheme to pass
arbitrary characters as a parm.

2. after the parm passes through the command processor, Java runtime
has yet another whack at it. It removes surrounding quotes, and can
even break a single parm into multiple ones if it contains a quote.

I don't think either of them ever though about the problem of trying
to pass a parm containing the kitchen sink (e.g. a regex).


Thompson, Bourne, Korn, Aho, Weinberger, Kernighan & Wall tinkerers?
Sure, why not! If thy command processor offends thee, download another
one:-) Most have some way to quote or escape special characters.

import java.io.*;
public class Grep {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
        String re = args[0];
        String line;
        BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(args[1]));
        while (true) {
            line = in.readLine();
            if (line == null) break;
            if (line.matches(re)) System.out.println(line);
        }
    }
}

Q. What unusual word has three "u"s and end with "y"?

$ java Grep "^.*u.?u.?u.*y$" /usr/share/dict/words
unusually

Of course, in a make file, you'd have to escape the $:

java Grep "u.?u.?u.*y$$" /usr/share/dict/words

John
--
John B. Matthews
trashgod at gmail dot com
home dot woh dot rr dot com slash jbmatthews

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