[NTLUG:Discuss] Strings in BASH, an easier way?

[terry]

On Thu, Dec 25, 2008 at 12:15 AM, Leroy Tennison <leroy_tennison at prodigy.net
> wrote:

> terry wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Dec 24, 2008 at 10:13 AM, richard witt <imageek72 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On Wed, Dec 24, 2008 at 9:36 AM, Robert Citek <robert.citek at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Do they give the same results?
>>>>
>>>> $ whatis  -r . | sort | uniq | wc -l
>>>> 4728
>>>>
>>>> $ man -k . | sort | uniq | wc -l
>>>> 4728
>>>>
>>>> $ for i in $(echo $PATH | cut -d: -f1- --output-delimiter=" "); do
>>>>  for j in $(ls -1 $i) ; do
>>>>   apropos $j
>>>>  done
>>>> done | sort | uniq | wc -l
>>>> apropos: fatal: regex `[': Invalid regular expression
>>>> 4688
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> rwitt at wslinux-rwitt ~ $ whatis -r .
>>> whatis: -r: unknown option
>>>
>>> rwitt at wslinux-rwitt ~ $ whatis --version
>>> whatis from man-1.6f
>>>
>>> Anyone have a clue why this does not work for me?
>>>
>>> ___
>>>
>>
>> I don't know, but same here.
>> The implementation of whatis on my Slackware 12.1 system does not
>> recognize the -r or -s switches.
>>
>> cap at pe-slack:~$ whatis -r
>> whatis: -r: unknown option
>> cap at pe-slack:~$ whatis -s
>> whatis: -s: unknown option
>> cap at pe-slack:~$ whatis --version
>> whatis from man-1.6f
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> http://www.ntlug.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>>
>>  Unfortunately, since you are only one dot version behind the current
> distribution, it sounds like Slackware has fallen behind on the revisions to
> it's utilities.


Yes, I am behind, but I intend to upgrade soon.

 Don't know what motivated you to select that distribution but it may be
> time to consider alternatives.  I had to do this with CentOS due to bugs in
> the ATA software with the 5.x version (at least so far, haven't tried 5.2
> and don't intend to after the grief I went through).  I'm now on SuSE 10.3.
>

>
> Suggest you consider one of the "big three": Red Hat variants, SuSE (are
> there variants?) or Debian.  If Slackware comes from one of these families
> then that would be the logical choice.
>

Don't worry, I'm not depriving myself, my Slackware system is quite the
awesome machine and I can most assuredly upgrade my version of man when-ever
I like, no need to switch distros just for a newer version of one
application, and besides that Slackware 12.2 contains man-1.6f

The BIG THREE - well, that's just a figure of speech, it doesn't really
matter what distro one chooses, we all share and have access the same BIG
batch of GNU applications. But while we are on the subject, if you'll look
back a few years, you'll see that SuSe started out as just a German
translation of Slackware, so in a sense, SuSe is a derivative of Slackware -
and yes, I know they ditched Slackware's package management and adopted
RPM.  Slackware is not primitive, it is stable.  We have more of a hands on
approach to package management but it's that way because we want it to be.

I usually don't recommend Slackware to newcomers, I recommend Ubuntu, Debian
or Fedora.  If they were French, I'd recommend Mandriva.  If they were
German, I guess I'd recommend SuSe  :)

Actually, that last paragraph was mostly just a joke - just teasing - but
seriously, I have recommended Slackware to newcomers and they've done quite
well with it.  My daughter uses Slackware and she and her family are doing
just great with it. And while my daughter and son-in-law are far from the
geek type advanced users you and I are, the two grand kids may have quite a
leg up in the fields of digital technology, having started their computer
related experiences on a nice Linux machine like Slackware.  Their system is
12.1 soon to be 12.2

It is interesting that SuSe and Slackware's release dates were so close this
year but I must say that my Slackware's 12.1 release beats your SuSe 11.1 by
1.1 version numbers and 8 days  :)

Merry Christmas!





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