Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Awk Programming Language

awk.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 159 posts

Re: The Awk Programming Language

#21

Post by kqr »

binary_ninja wrote: post #2

Awk has always been a language that I loved but I have struggled to use besides quick jobs for parsing text files. I understand it is meant to be use for exactly that, but the fact that is simple, fast and lightweight sometimes makes me want to do something more with it, but when I start trying to do something besides parsing text I find that it starts becoming awkward (pun intented?).

This is exactly why I moved from AWK to Perl for these quick jobs a couple of years ago. If you stick to an AWK-like subset, Perl is also simple, fast and lightweight. If you want to grow your scripts (and you have a lot of discipline) Perl – in contrast to AWK – gives you enough noose to hang^W^W^W^Wthe tools you need.

Re: The Awk Programming Language

#23

Post by kqr »

siraben wrote: post #10

Awk is awesome! Glad that they are looking to modernize the book. It wasn't really necessary, all the code examples in the original edition of the book still run just fine, although some are somewhat dated, like printing ASCII bar graphs. They also had examples of writing VMs, parsers and interpreters in the book, which run on modern implementations.[0] The language has some quirks. To declare temporary variables, it…

What would you suggest as an alternative to printing ASCII bar graphs? I do that all the time. Takes 20 seconds and often makes distributions, modalities, and patterns over time obvious right away.

Re: The Awk Programming Language

#25

Post by benhoyt »

I was privileged to be one of the technical reviewers for this book. There's a fair bit of the original content (which is still great), but Kernighan's done a great job with some good restructuring and some significant updates, too. The early chapters are very hands-on, with something of a focus on "exploratory data processing", particularly with CSV files. Big data with AWK, you could say.

Gawk and awk will soon have a new "--csv" option that enables proper CSV input mode (parsing files with quoted and multiline fields per the CSV RFC). I'm really glad Arnold Robbins added a robust "--csv" implementation to Gawk, too, because that's really the most-heavily used version of AWK nowadays. I've already got CSV support in my own GoAWK implementation, and I'll be adding "--csv" to make it compatible.

I'm really glad this new updated version is coming out!

Re: The Awk Programming Language

#28

Post by joeythedolphin »

kqr wrote: post #21
binary_ninja wrote: post #2

Awk has always been a language that I loved but I have struggled to use besides quick jobs for parsing text files. I understand it is meant to be use for exactly that, but the fact that is simple, fast and lightweight sometimes makes me want to do something more with it, but when I start trying to do something besides parsing text I find that it starts becoming awkward (pun intented?).

This is exactly why I moved from AWK to Perl for these quick jobs a couple of years ago. If you stick to an AWK-like subset, Perl is also simple, fast and lightweight. If you want to grow your scripts (and you have a lot of discipline) Perl – in contrast to AWK – gives you enough noose to hang^W^W^W^Wthe tools you need.

Perl? Wow. Is that better than bash, python or even nodejs? Why write in Perl over these? Serious question, was propaghandized to hate Perl.

Re: The Awk Programming Language

#29

Post by kar1181 »

One of the first utilities I had to get to grips with way back was awk, and it serves me well to this day. Best bang for buck investment of time in my entire career. Even today I still use some variant of awk -F(x) '{print $x}'.

Re: The Awk Programming Language

#30

Post by apienx »

Thanks for your work! Awk is a rabbit hole.

"Dark corners are basically fractal - no matter how much you illuminate, there is always a smaller but darker one." - - Brian Kernighan (quoted in the GNU Awk book)

Post reply on HN