bourne shell query

[William R. Pringle]

In article <1209 at wrs.wrs.com> roger at kymijoki.wrs.com (Roger Rohrbach) writes:
>fred at maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca (Fred Whiteside) writes:
>
>>cd /usr/spool/news/comp/std/c
>>zots=$1
>>echo "Should ignore files with name < $zots"
>>files=`ls -rt * |grep -v '.*[a-zA-Z].*' | awk $1 '>=' $zots {print}`
>>echo $files
>
>
(Followed by several variations on how to arrange quotes so that
a shell variable can get into an AWK program.)

I'm surprised no one mentioned the simple way:

	awk '$1 >= MAX{print}' MAX=$zots -

The MAX=value sets the awk variable MAX to 'value', the dash is needed
to indicate using stdin.  You could eliminate the grep by letting awk
do it for you:

	awk '/^[0-9]*/{if ($1 >= MAX) print}' MAX=$zots -

No that we have probably confused the original poster beyond hope ...

Good luck!
Bill Pringle

The nice thing about Unix is that there are so many right answers!