Chad Fowler [mailto:chad / chadfowler.com] answered:
> 
> Hi.  Here's a very awk-like way to do it:
> 
> cat foo.dat |ruby -ane 'puts $F[0].to_i * $F[1].to_i'
> 
> -a autosplits and creates $F, which is an array of the fields on each 
> line.
> 
> -n creates a loop for each line of input.
> 
> -e executes the next arg as a ruby program.
> 
> One interesting note if you're coming from awk is that the record 
> separator (specified by -F on the command line of both Ruby and awk) 
> can accept a regular expression.  So (for a silly example), you could 
> have a file like this:
> 
> this123123124is524234234a987234872test
> 
> and executing
> ruby -F[0-9]+ -ane 'puts $F[3]'
> ...would output "test"

cool tip. thank you very much.

> Chad

kin regards -botp