[Info-vax] Text processing on VMS

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 10/13/2024 11:04 AM, David Meyer wrote:
> I've got a text file with data that I want to select lines matching
> certain character strings, then extract string values from the selected
> lines by character position. On Unix, I would use awk or Perl. Does VMS
> have a similar tool, should I use my favorite programming language and
> call the STR$ RTL, can I write a TPU script to do this, or should I
> transfer the file to a Unix box and user awk or Perl? ;)

Both Perl and gawk are available for VMS.

VSI distribute Perl - Alpha and Itanium here 
https://vmssoftware.com/products/perl/ - x86-64 I believe comes with VMS

Gawk you can get from the net - 
https://vms.process.com/scripts/fileserv/fileserv.com?GAWK

You can also use some other script language: Python, Groovy etc..

(I like Groovy)

A traditional VMS language (Cobol,Fortran,Basic,Pascal) and builtin
string functionality or STR$ calls will likely be much more code.

Arne