Picking a character from a word

[Rahul Dhesi]

The solutions offered to this question point out a weakness in the UNIX
utilities:

     The UNIX utilities are far from being a minimal, orthogonal,
     complete set of tools.

There is a lot of overlap in what the different tools do.  Yet there
are many things that none of them do properly.

Reckless speculation follows:  Perhaps AT&T, while designing the latest
and greatest non-BSD version of UNIX, will do something about this.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi         UUCP:  <backbones>!{iuvax,pur-ee,uunet}!bsu-cs!dhesi