Here are some clever one-liners for awk [1] Please be sure to add your own. [1] - https://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/matching/awk/YXdr/sor...
reminds me of the old Knuth vs McIlroy word count battle
Why Learn Awk? (2016)
11–20 of 246 posts
Re: Why Learn Awk? (2016)
#12I love awk, but I'm still waiting for the structural regex awk: http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/structural_regexps/se.pdf
Re: Why Learn Awk? (2016)
#13Because for some bizarre reason, "cut" doesn't ship with any decent column selection logic that is the equivalent of awk's $1, $2, etc., even in 2020. That's like 90% of my use of awk right there. I don't know of any easier equivalent of "awk '{ print $2 }'" for what it does. Posted partially so the Internet Correction Squad can froth at the mouth and set me straight, because I'd love to be showed to be wrong here.
The reason isn't that bizarre; it's a POSIX utility and must conform to the specification, which you can read here:
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/c...
Re: Why Learn Awk? (2016)
#14It is fast, robust, and frequently far more performant than a lot of modern tools that can be overkill for most data manipulation. I use it all the time in our ETL processes and it always works as advertised.
Re: Why Learn Awk? (2016)
#15Why not just use Emacs for simple scripts and text manipulation? Way easier, lots of one liners as well, just as expressive.
Re: Why Learn Awk? (2016)
#16Awk, like shell, is a fraught programming environment, full of silent failure and hidden gotchas. Even for one-liners. I use shell because I have to, not because I like it. I dread maintaining shell scripts which have a bunch of awk and sed in them. The Unix ideal of small single-purpose tools and text processing is separable from these old warhorses.
scripts are the antithesis of modern software development. No Unit testing, No CI, no monitoring, no consistency, often no source control. Appeals to me as a hacker but only my scripts are intelligible - which is a bad sign. :)
Re: Why Learn Awk? (2016)
#17Awk, like shell, is a fraught programming environment, full of silent failure and hidden gotchas. Even for one-liners. I use shell because I have to, not because I like it. I dread maintaining shell scripts which have a bunch of awk and sed in them. The Unix ideal of small single-purpose tools and text processing is separable from these old warhorses.
scripts are the antithesis of modern software development. No Unit testing, No CI, no monitoring, no consistency, often no source control. Appeals to me as a hacker but only my scripts are intelligible - which is a bad sign. :)
PowerShell begs to differ.
Re: Why Learn Awk? (2016)
#18Because for some bizarre reason, "cut" doesn't ship with any decent column selection logic that is the equivalent of awk's $1, $2, etc., even in 2020. That's like 90% of my use of awk right there. I don't know of any easier equivalent of "awk '{ print $2 }'" for what it does. Posted partially so the Internet Correction Squad can froth at the mouth and set me straight, because I'd love to be showed to be wrong here.
And awk doesn't offers cut's column range selection ;)
Re: Why Learn Awk? (2016)
#19Because for some bizarre reason, "cut" doesn't ship with any decent column selection logic that is the equivalent of awk's $1, $2, etc., even in 2020. That's like 90% of my use of awk right there. I don't know of any easier equivalent of "awk '{ print $2 }'" for what it does. Posted partially so the Internet Correction Squad can froth at the mouth and set me straight, because I'd love to be showed to be wrong here.
The reason isn't that bizarre; it's a POSIX utility and must conform to the specification, which you can read here: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/c...
Does POSIX forbid extensions? That would be terrible.
Re: Why Learn Awk? (2016)
#20Awk, like shell, is a fraught programming environment, full of silent failure and hidden gotchas. Even for one-liners. I use shell because I have to, not because I like it. I dread maintaining shell scripts which have a bunch of awk and sed in them. The Unix ideal of small single-purpose tools and text processing is separable from these old warhorses.
While I agree that the silent failures and "opaqueness" can be off-putting, once you understand the tool and how to implement it in your workflow it is wonderfully efficient. Aside from being syntactically terse I haven't found any compelling reasons not to use it.