mktext - An Useless Text-Processing Utility that Exploits Make Functions.

DON'T USE IT IN PRODUCTION CODE.

We developed mktext just to demo how to use Make functions.

System Requirement

A recent sh compatible shell.
A recent GNU Make >= 3.81

We tested mktext on a recent CentOS. It should work on most modern Unix-like systems.

Usage

mktext provides several actions in functional styles:

any
all
filter
select
sub
sort
first
last
nth
range

any checks whether any element fits cond:

$ ./mktext any x x y z
true

all checks whether all elements fit cond:

$ ./mktext all x x y z
false

filter removes elements by cond:

$ ./mktext filter "a b c" a b c d e f g
d
e
f
g

select keeps elements by cond:

$ ./mktext select "a b c" a b c d e f g
a
b
c

sub replaces from with to:

$ ./mktext sub ee ea beer deer feet
bear
dear
feat

sort sorts elements alphabetically:

$ ./mktext sort b d a e c
a
b
c
d
e

first returns the first element:

$ ./mktext first a b c d e
a

last returns the last element:

$ ./mktext last a b c d e
e

nth returns the nth element:

$ ./mktext nth 4 a b c d e
d

range returns the elements from mth to nth, inclusively on both side:

$ ./mktext range 2 4 a b c d e
b
c
d

Besides, use -h and --help to print help message:

$ ./mktext --help
Usage: ./mktext action ...

Actions:
        all cond arg_a arg_b arg_c ...
(Omit some message...)

Philosophy

Make functions are a small sets of LISPy functions that are greek to many programmers from C family languages. Hence, we wrote mktext to show how to (improperly) use those functions.

make itself is unable to handle command-line arguments and several other features seen in mktext. To handle those issues, we embedded a Makefile in a shell script so that we can manage those issues with a sh compatible shell. We limit ourself in the features provided by make when possble; otherwise, we use the features available in the system shell.

To make a more useful alternative, consider to port it in Perl or some other modern scripting language.

Author

Michael Chen, 2018.

License