41–50 of 124 posts
Something I crave in the worst way is a sensible story for accumulating a “toolbox” of snippets and scripts and commands. They don’t need to be ready to go, but ideally: - natural language searchable - add a small description - CLI to search, examine, and copy - not a plugin - sync with a GitHub repo.
(That's a web version but I usually access it on the cli or in my editor)
For "keep the first word of every line", I prefer awk:
awk '{ print $1 }' There are a ton of little errors in this post (at the time of my leaving this comment, of course): the variable delimiter example is missing the close _, the first word example is missing the open ', and the except line 5 example is missing a space; meanwhile, these snippets will cause bad habits, such as thinking about "words" as "things involving letters", using -r instead of -E, and a massive knowledge gap with re…
You're right, I'm using -r even when it's not necessary. To my defense I think it's a good habit to have since without it regex expressions are painful to write. I didn't considered that using -E it's a better choice but I'll correct that now. (one might argue again that typing -r is easier than -E :D ).
Regarding the definition of words - I also thought of that when I wrote that snippet. I know it's not the complete regex for a word and that word regex patterns might differ. And I was probably a bit lazy - but I'll correct it presently.
I'd also like to say that I didn't write this as an absolute and ultimate reference. If I'm honest I wrote this as much to teach others as to solidify this knowledge myself. Now since it seems it gained traction I'm kinda obligated to make this better, no? Darn. :)
PS: if you'd like to help me make this better please submit a pull request or leave a comment here. Looking at your profile I see that you try to limit your online time so I probably shouldn've asked. :P
I really dislike sed, awk, and all these utilities because I just can’t remember how to use them. Every time I want to use one of these tools I have to relearn the stuff, and then after a while I forget how to use it. If I don’t use it all the time I just forget. I really don’t think non-interactive CLIs are a good way to do complicated tasks.
curl cheat.sh/sed
Will show you several examples.
I really dislike sed, awk, and all these utilities because I just can’t remember how to use them. Every time I want to use one of these tools I have to relearn the stuff, and then after a while I forget how to use it. If I don’t use it all the time I just forget. I really don’t think non-interactive CLIs are a good way to do complicated tasks.
Or you can use Org-Mode (with babel), if you're an Emacs user.
That's how I write all documentation involving some sort of code.
I really dislike sed, awk, and all these utilities because I just can’t remember how to use them. Every time I want to use one of these tools I have to relearn the stuff, and then after a while I forget how to use it. If I don’t use it all the time I just forget. I really don’t think non-interactive CLIs are a good way to do complicated tasks.
I basically use it for simple text substitutions; in that case it is the same as what I use for vim editing.
Mastering one tool is probably wise, but it's also good to know which tools may be better suited for some purposes. For "keep the first word of every line", I prefer awk: awk '{ print $1 }'
Here's a groovy script to do the same:
new File('file.txt').eachLine { println it.split()[0] }
Sed is probably the one tool I owe my career most to. I made a living mostly on it for a few years as an ops guy, and I didn't even know half of these use cases. The variable delimiter alone was such a beautifully thought out decision that made everything easier, that I likely would have never considered had I written it.
Btw, there is one more use case of a variable delimiter which is more arcane (and you can combine it with the other custom delimiter) `sed -s '\_/bin/bash_s:grep:egrep:' myfile.txt`