I have a customer with SCO Unix and Windows . He has is a program that can create a large textfile. What he will use this program for is to create a text file that will contain a large amount of customer statements. How it will be parsed is up to us. He wants to run a program that will read thru the text file and email the statements. We are in the how in the hell do we want to do this stage. This is going to take some decent string manipulation and parsing. seperating the header from the the detail lines each detail line from one another and individual statements from each other . Then sending the email so that hopefully each statement arrives at correct customer and the statement is readable. We have little experiance in unix programming. This looks like a one time deal. So what we need is way to do this that has the quickest learning curve. Would it be C,awk,other or even a Windows method(I know blasphomy on this board)

You really don't say where the text file is created - SCO or Windows. You also don't mention whether you are able to email from SCO easily. I would hate to parse any file using C, and I'm a fair C programmer. I'd rather use Unix tools. Of course, the best tools are the ones you have expertise with. If it's a one time deal you might consider hiring a contractor. Regards, Nails

I still do not know a lot of information about how he creates this file. I have been just told he has a tool to create it. But an ASCII file should be the same in both and he has the ability to copy the file between systems. Our tools are prehistoric and will have to deal with the Unix or Windows tools anyway. I am communicating with a newsgroup about that. But I just need the basics on the unix tools

Ed: IMO, If you don't have sendmail working on SCO Unix, it's probably going to be easier to do the emailing from windows? If you want to email me a copy of your spec, I'll be glad to give you an opinion. Your choice. Nails

Perl (Practical Extraction and Reporting Language) would be the perfect tool for this task. It was originaly designed for (but not limited to) text processing. Once it parses the file, it can open a SMTP connection to your mail server and send all emails (without the need for sendmail). Perl is probably already installed on the SCO system, but if not, it can easily be installed on either SCO or Windows. http://cpan.org/ports/index.html No matter which tool you decide on, we'd need to see the format and sample contents of the text file.

I have a lot more information on what my customer is trying to do. He has SCO 5.05. He has UUCP but no SendMail. He is creating the ASCII text files thru the DBL language. He wants to have one program do many things. One day he may want to do as I said above type in customer statements and email them the statements. The next day he would want to use the program to choose type in a invitation to the company Christmas bash and email them to 5 people. Can this be done thru DBL? If not what language would be good. Would it be a good idea to convert the text to HTML or PDF?.

So, the ASCII files are created with DBL. From what I understand, DBL is a proprietory language similar to COBOL. I seriously doubt you're going to find anybody familiar with DBL - even if your customer has a DBL compiler/interpreter. I'd use the standard unix tools, like grep, awk,perl to parse the files. How big are the text files? That could take time. Converting the text to HTML or PDF depends on how you want to deliver the final product to the people being emailed. UUCP stands for Unix-to-Unix Copy and it's old. Maybe somebody has come up with a way to use it to copy from SCO to windows, but I'm not aware of it. Bottom line: It sounds like your customer wants a fairly flexible program and so you're not going to do it with a 3 line unix shell script. It also sounds like it's straining the resources of your system.