Re: [9fans] command repetition in sam/acme

[roger peppe <rogpeppe@gmail.com>]

2009/3/3 Rudolf Sykora <rudolf.sykora@gmail.com>:
>> I would do it with awk myself, Much depends on what you want to
>> do to the 1000'th word on the line.
>
> Say I really want to get there, so that I can manually edit the place.

if i really had to do this (as a one-off), i'd probably do it in a
few stages:

copy & paste the line to a New blank window.
in the new window:
Edit ,x/[ 	]+/a/\n/
:1000

edit as desired
Edit ,x/\n/d

copy and paste back to the original window.

if you were going to do this a lot, you could easily make a little
script to tell you the offset of the 1000th word.

e.g.
sed 's/[ \t]+/&\n/' | sed 1000q | tr -d '\012' | wc -c

actually that doesn't work 'cos sed has line length issues.
so i'd probably do it in C - the program would take the line
as stdin and could print out address
of the word in acme-friendly notation, e.g. :-++#8499;+#6

it'd only be a few minutes to write.

another option would be to write a little script that used the
addr file repeatedly to find the nth match of a regexp.