Re: [9fans] blanks already handled properly?

[Geoff Collyer <geoff@collyer.net>]

> In case this solves the problem, we would only have to search for
> programs that don't handle ' ' within file names and fix them; then
> remove quoting from the output of programs that do not output
> commands; then add quoting to the output of programs that output
> commands.

But this assumes that programs know when they are and aren't
manipulating file names, which is not true in general (see Software
Tools for a fuller exposition of this philosophy).  sort and awk don't
know if field 4 is a file name or not.  Plus, as Charles observed, one
might want to quote fields other than file names that contain blanks.

In some ways, it seems that adopting a non-space delimiter might be
the least painful of the alternatives to deal with file formats.


While I'm here, this is the script I use to print hex values and
glyphs (if we have any) of characters listed in /lib/unicode:

#!/bin/rc
# uniquery pattern... - print hex & glyph of any chars matching pattern
#	in /lib/unicode
sts=''
for (pat) {
	hexes = `{grep $pat /lib/unicode | column 1}
	if (~ $#hexes 0) {
		echo $0: no such unicode chars: $pat >[1=2]
		sts='no such chars'
	}
	if not
		for (hex in $hexes)
			unicode $hex-$hex
}
exit $sts

You can replace "column 1" with "awk '{print $1}'".  This is column:

#!/bin/rc
# column [-F sep] [n...]] - print n'th column(s)
rfork e
switch ($1) {
case -F
	sep=-F^$2; shift 2
case -F?*
	sep=-F^`{echo $1 | sed 's/^-F//'}; shift
}
switch ($#*) {
case 0
	* = 1
case *
	if (! ~ $1 [0-9] [0-9][0-9] [0-9][0-9][0-9]) {
		echo usage: $0 '[-F sep] [n...]' >[1=2]
		exit usage
	}
}
arglist=`{echo $* | sed -e 's/[0-9]+/$&,/g' -e 's/,$//'}
exec awk $sep '{print '^$"arglist^'}'

Here's a sample use of uniquery:

: cpu; uniquery space
0008
0020  
00a0  
2002  
2003  
2004  
2005  
2006  
2007  
2008  
2009  
200a  
200b ​
2408 ␈
2420 ␠
3000 　
303f 〿
feff