Re: Warn about long lines

[Alejandro Colomar]

Hi Ralph,

On 8/23/22 12:37, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> Hi Alejandro,
>
> > Thunderbird doesn't seem to like me.
>
> Oh, yes, it didn't occur to me it had been split in transit.
>
> > >       $ groff -Tutf8 -man -ww longline.man |
> > >       > awk 'length > 80 {print; e = 1} END {exit e}'
> > >            this is a very long line that will go past the 80-col right margin, 
> > > and I want to be warned about it.
> > >       $ echo $?
> > >       1
> > >       $
> >
> > I like that use of awk(1)!
> > I was never an awk(1) user, but this one I can't seem to replace it with
> > simpler tools.  Seems like the tool for the job!
>
> Oh, that was just the first way my fingers thought of.
> sed(1) could do it with the GNU extension of an exit code to ‘q’.
> But easiest and fastest is probably plain old grep(1).
> Note the inversion of grep's exit code with ‘!’, assuming this is
> bash(1) and ‘pipefail’ is not set.
>
>      ! groff -Tutf8 -man -ww longline.man |
>      expand |
>      grep '^.\{80\}.'

Ahh, I forgot about \{N\}, since I never use it.

Still, the Makefile uses pipefail, so I'm not sure how to make grep(1) 
work for this.  If it works, it would be nice.

Didn't know about the GNU extension to sed(1)'s q.  That would be 
simpler than grep(1), since we use pipefail.  And I prefer sed(1) over 
awk(1).

> I don't think expand(1) is required here as grotty(1) only puts uses
> tabs with ‘-h’, but I thought it deserved mention in case your set up is
> different.

No, I don't need it.

Thanks!

Alex

--
Alejandro Colomar
<http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>

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