csh question (and ksh port maybe)

[Jonathan I. Kamens]

In article <45969 at sequent.UUCP>, calvin at sequent.sequent.com (Calvin Goodrich) writes:
|> can any of you unix.gods tell me what :e :h :t :r :q :x :gh :gt :gr
|> stand for in csh? i've seen these used before but couldn't figure them out.
|> for the rtfm'ers in the crowd: yes, i read the man pages on csh but couldn't
|> get an informative answer.

  Then you must have an emasculated version of the csh man page, because mine
documents them as follows:

     After the optional word
     designator can be placed a sequence of modifiers, each pre-
     ceded by a `:'.  The following modifiers are defined:

          h      Remove a trailing pathname component, leaving the head.
          r      Remove a trailing `.xxx' component, leaving the root name.
          e      Remove all but the extension `.xxx' part.
          s/l/r/ Substitute l for r
          t      Remove all leading pathname components, leaving the tail.
          &      Repeat the previous substitution.
          g      Apply the change globally, prefixing the above, e.g. `g&'.
          p      Print the new command but do not execute it.
          q      Quote the substituted words, preventing further substitutions.
          x      Like q, but break into words at blanks, tabs and newlines.

If your csh man page doesn't have this, I suggest you get a new csh man page. 
If it does, then what exactly about it do you not understand?

|> next question: do these things have an equivalent in ksh? apparently ksh
|> doesn't have these little buggers. if they're useful i want to be able to
|> use them in my favorite (imho, anyway) shell.

  I don't use ksh, but from a quick look at the ksh man page, I don't see
anything that can do what all of the modifiers above do.  Some of them can be
done by calling a subprocess such as sed or awk; others can probably be done
using clever quoting, and still others can probably be done with ksh commands
that I'd know about if I used ksh regularly :-).

-- 
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