Re: [gentoo-dev] what to do when an ebuild needs loads of RAM?

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 06:21:47 +0000 (GMT) Ed Grimm
<paranoid@××××××××××××××××××××××.org> wrote:
| cat | grep | (sed|awk) lines have always bothered me to no end.  How
| about, instead, one of the following function bodies:
| 
|     awk '/MemTotal/ { print $2}' /proc/meminfo
|     sed -r -e '/MemTotal/!d' -e 's/[^0-9]*([0-9]+).*/\1/'
|     /proc/meminfo perl -ne '/MemTotal:\s+(\d+)/ && print "$1\n"'
|     /proc/meminfoo grep MemTotal | (read tag size units; echo $size)
| 
| Normally, I wouldn't bring it up, but there's *so* many ways to do
| that better, it's sad.  Note that I could've listed many more, but
| that would've been sad as well.  (Actually, even this much is somewhat
| sad.) Personally, I'd vote for the first or third of this group.

Best to avoid awk, it's horridly unportable between implementations, and
if possible it's better to avoid perl unless you actually need it. The
sed solution is safest, and it's probably nicer to do it in one command:

sed -n -e '/MemTotal:/s/^[^:]*: *\([0-9]\+\).*/\1/p' /proc/meminfo

Maybe I should make my "cat abuse" remarks less subtle next time :)

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Vim, Fluxbox, Sparc, Mips)
Mail            : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web             : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm