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This article was posted to the Usenet group alt.hackers in 1995; any technical information is probably outdated.

Boolean Grep?


Article: 7773 of alt.hackers
From: chrisbib@umd.umich.edu (Christopher Bibbs)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Boolean Grep?
Date: 7 May 1995 12:05:48 -0400
Organization: Univerisity of Michigan - Dearborn
Lines: 31
Approved: No-never!
Message-ID: 3oir4s$52s@task.umd.umich.edu
NNTP-Posting-Host: task.umd.umich.edu
X-Newsreader: NN version 6.5.0 #3 (NOV)
Status: RO


Ok, I've been working on this for awhile and no one seems to be able to
figure it out so I'll put it out here.  I'm trying to get grep or a grep
like function to return a true-false to be used in a script.  Before you
say use perl I should say that the point of this is expressly NOT to use
perl.  Basically, I'm grepping some inputs and if true the script
responds with (you guessed it) True.  We don't want to see the line(s) that
triggered the true or the file name(s) just the line true.  If anyone has
a clue, I'd love to hear it.

ObHack:  Hmmm... ok, this is pretty lame, but will have to do.  Since I
work in a lab that is 90% PC's and 10% Mac-refugee-camp I take a lot of
crap from the other conselor's.  (I'm the sole Mac user amongst them)
Well over the last term the almight PC's have been infected with more
viruses than a cheap hooker and the Mac's have been clean as a whistle.
What a shock.  So at term's end we were flooded with users saying things
like, "What do you mean its gone?" and "But I only use it in
this lab.".
Generally we just say, "Should have made a backup." and send
them back
looking like little kids after watching Bambi get shot.  However, one of
our last such users was a prof... a CIS prof.  The desire to fix his disk
was unreal!  After watching everyone else work on it for 45 minutes I
took the disk, slipped it in the Mac, copied the files, reformatted the
disk, copied the files back, and gave the disk to the prof.  The looks
they gave me.  I didn't tell them that you could do the same thing on the
UNIX boxes.  Moral of the story:  Always have at least two OS's running
that can read (if not use) each others files/disks.  Proves to be an
invaluable tool for removing viruses.
--
Christopher Bibbs                  | The coroner declared Mr. Stanwyck
chrisbib@umich.edu                 | dead... or extremely sleepy.
http://www.umd.umich.edu/~chrisbib |	-Fletch



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