Begining of lline search

[Madhu Mohan]

Hello,

Can anyone please update me in OpenVMS how to do a begining/start of line search , somthing like 'grep ^text' which searches for 'text' at the begining of line in unix.

[Jan van den Ende]

Madhu Mohan,

To begin: WELCOME to the VMS Forum!

Your question immediate leads to another:

WHICH VERSION of OpenVMS?

Recent versions DO have something similar to this capability...

Proost.

Have one on me.

jpe

[Joseph Huber_1]

Get GNV , it contains grep and many other GNU utilities.
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/opensource/gnv.html

[Hein van den Heuvel]

Standard OpenVMS search does not have this.

Just use gnu/gnv grep, awk or perl to do this, on OpenVMS.

$ perl -ne "print if /^text/" x.x

(Un)fortunately perl opens (input) files exclusively.
So if you need to search a live (log) file, then you need an explicit open such as:

$fh = vmsopen( $file, qw( shr=put mbc=112 mbf=4))

Good luck!
Hein

[labadie_1]

If you are on Openvms Alpha, you can do it on a standard VMS box, just define a symbol awk

$ awk :== $SYS$COMMON[SYSHLP.EXAMPLES.TCPIP.SNMP]GAWK.EXE

and then you can do

$ ty test.tmp
Port123
ABC Port

$ ty bb.awk
/^Port/ { print }

$ awk/input=bb.awk test.tmp
Port123

[Hoff]

The VMS search mechanisms are weak and exceedingly slow, and the operating system lacks regex support.

If you're willing to run with a slow search (and akin to the VMS SEARCH command), then use grep available via the GNV tools, or one of the available add-on grep or egrep tools.

Or load and use perl or other such, which have similar (low) performance.

Or roll your own DCL loop to do this stuff.

Or (if you're finding yourself doing more of these searches) then remote-mount the disk structure or replicate the disk structure, and index it, and search it from a box that has indexing and search capabilities.

[Steven Schweda]

Since about 6-JUL-1999, I've used a (crude
spelling-advice) command procedure which does
something like the following. (Note that
"/format = nonulls" would be unnecessary for
a typical input file, but this example file
is atypical.)

Too simple:

alp $ search /format = nonulls -
sys$library:vms$password_dictionary.data searche
researcher
researchers
researches
searched
searches

Better:

alp $ search /format = nonulls -
sys$library:vms$password_dictionary.data searche -
/key = (pos = 1, siz = 'f$length( "searche")')
searched
searches

Of course, a working "grep" might be easier.

(The spelling advice would be better if that
word list didn't contain so many misspelled
words, but it is cheap and available.)

[Graham Burley]

Depends on your OpenVMS version, either:

$ search somefile text*/wild=strict

or

$ search somefile text/key=(pos:1,siz:4)

[Ian Miller.]

I use FIND which appeared on Freeware V6
e.g
http://digiater.com/openvms/freeware/v60/find015/