From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Received: by archone.tamu.edu id <18987>; Fri, 18 Oct 1991 14:31:36 -0500
From: Byron Rakitzis <byron>
To: rc
Subject: Re: how to drop the nth element of a list
Message-Id: <91Oct18.143136cdt.18987@archone.tamu.edu>
Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1991 14:31:31 -0500

You can do this in at most the cost of 3 forks and 2 execs; suppose that
$foo contains the list you want to operate on, and $n contains the number
of the element you wish to remove:

	foo=$foo(`{seq 1 $#foo | grep -v '^'$n'$'})

You could also probably do the stuff in backquotes in a single awk job,
but it involves more messing around with quotes, and takes longer to
type. Still, it will run faster:

	awk 'BEGIN{
		for (i = 1; i < '$#foo'; i++)
			if (i != '$n')
				print i
		exit
	}'

Packaging this into an rc function is left as an excercise for the
reader...