[jason@sun ~]$: The Solaris junkie finds a home

I ran into a problem today with spaces in /etc/syslog.conf.  Any spaces between the selectors and actions upset the m4 parser -- you've got to use tabs.

I'm using a deployment / provisioning tool (not xVM) that wants to put spaces in that file.  Very frustrating.

Here's a one-liner Perl script that strips out the spaces and replaces them with tabs.  The file will look a little ugly, but at least it'll work.

# perl -pi'*.bak' -e 's/^(\S+?\.\S+)\s*(\S*)/$1\t\t$2/' /etc/syslog.conf

There are a hundred ways to skin this cat, but this was quick and only one line, which is what I needed.

Enjoy.