Linux Zone Features REXX Text Processing

This article is not new, but I wanted to mention it anyway.  http://gnosis.cx/publish/programming/rexx.html discusses using REXX's built-in string processing functions to help perform text processing.  This could be used, for example, to pull information from one or more text files to create summary reports.

The example that comes to mind is of a VOIP switch (which routes telephone calls across the Internet in order to give the company more control over its costs and reliability and quality of service).  Many of them have a serial cable that enables them to give logging information to a computer.  Using some software to receive this data stream and produce a daily log file, one could have a REXX script that goes through that file each day to produce a report of incoming versus outgoing, long versus short, call totals, and call average.

One could probably do something like this using standard Unix utilities like sed and awk, or probably even easier in REXX or Perl or Python or Ruby. 

We are about to cover some file-handling, and then we'll want to try and develop a simple text-file processing script in REXX. 

Tags: REXX