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Awk: The Power and Promise of a 40-Year-Old Language

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Re: Awk: The Power and Promise of a 40-Year-Old Language

#11

Post by [deleted] »

mellavora wrote: post #10
justin_oaks wrote: post #7

I only recently learned Awk enough to be useful. But I still don't reach for it when I probably should. What are the most common cases where you reach for Awk instead of some other tools? I recently used it to parse and recombine data from the OpenVPN status file. That file has a few differently formatted tables in the same file. Using Awk, I was able to change a variable as each table was encountered, this I could c…

try running this: awk '{cmd="rm " FILENAME; print cmd; system(cmd) }' file* best results if you do 'sudo' first ymmv

[deleted]

Re: Awk: The Power and Promise of a 40-Year-Old Language

#12

Post by generalizations »

mellavora wrote: post #10
justin_oaks wrote: post #7

I only recently learned Awk enough to be useful. But I still don't reach for it when I probably should. What are the most common cases where you reach for Awk instead of some other tools? I recently used it to parse and recombine data from the OpenVPN status file. That file has a few differently formatted tables in the same file. Using Awk, I was able to change a variable as each table was encountered, this I could c…

try running this: awk '{cmd="rm " FILENAME; print cmd; system(cmd) }' file* best results if you do 'sudo' first ymmv

At least add a /s to your comment. I like learning from the stuff people comment on here, and while there's an element of "that would be an important lesson" to what you posted, it's mostly just an unnecessary landmine.

Re: Awk: The Power and Promise of a 40-Year-Old Language

#13

Post by vyuh »

"A good programmer uses the most powerful tool to do a job. A great programmer uses the least powerful tool that does the job." I believe this, and I always try to find the combination of simple and lightweight tools which does the job at hand correctly.

Awk sometimes proves surprisingly powerful. Just look at the concision of this awk one liner doing a fairly complex job:

    zcat large.log.gz | awk '{print $0 | "gzip -v9c > large.log-"$1"_"$2".gz"}' # Breakup compressed log by syslog date and recompress. #awksome
Taken from: https://mobile.twitter.com/climagic/status/61415389723039744...

Re: Awk: The Power and Promise of a 40-Year-Old Language

#14

Post by zeveb »

> Very few people still code with the legacies of the 1970s: ML, Pascal, Scheme, Smalltalk.

Arguably, the software world would be better off if more people did code with those 1970s languages, than with the ones we are stuck with now.

And that applies to Awk, too. As the author quotes Neil Ormos stating, Awk is well suited for personal computing, something which we have gotten further and further from at the same time as computers have become more distributed. At what point in history have such a large fraction of the human race had the ability to calculate to such an amazing order of magnitude, and at what point in history have such a large fraction of the same human race not bothered with calculation?

Awk is a great tool precisely because it puts quite a lot of expressive power in the hands of an average user on a Unix system. Sure, on a Lisp machine or Smalltalk machine there really isn't the same need for Awk: the systems languages on such machines are safe enough and expressive enough to do what Awk does. But in the Unix context — which is basically what we're all living in, with even the VMS-derived Windows more-or-less adhering to the Unix model — Awk is a godsend.

edit: correct typo

Re: Awk: The Power and Promise of a 40-Year-Old Language

#15

Post by coliveira »

justin_oaks wrote: post #7

I only recently learned Awk enough to be useful. But I still don't reach for it when I probably should. What are the most common cases where you reach for Awk instead of some other tools? I recently used it to parse and recombine data from the OpenVPN status file. That file has a few differently formatted tables in the same file. Using Awk, I was able to change a variable as each table was encountered, this I could c…

Anything that is command line based and needs small changes to text input can be done with awk. It is a very competent language for scripts.

Re: Awk: The Power and Promise of a 40-Year-Old Language

#16

Post by jfk13 »

Scarbutt wrote: post #9
melling wrote: post #5

i no longer use it but Perl was always the better solution when one thought AWK was the answer. Perl will do those things where AWK really shines and if the problem got bigger, Perl was easier to deal with.

Yes but you can't learn perl as quickly as you can learn awk.

Though you can learn just enough perl to do awk-like things fairly easily. And then grow from there as needed.

Re: Awk: The Power and Promise of a 40-Year-Old Language

#17

Post by coliveira »

melling wrote: post #5

i no longer use it but Perl was always the better solution when one thought AWK was the answer. Perl will do those things where AWK really shines and if the problem got bigger, Perl was easier to deal with.

The problem is that awk is a very simple language, which you can learn in an afternoon. Perl is a very complex language, and is not used anymore, so you're just spending your time on something you'll rarely use.

Re: Awk: The Power and Promise of a 40-Year-Old Language

#19

Post by chasil »

justin_oaks wrote: post #7

I only recently learned Awk enough to be useful. But I still don't reach for it when I probably should. What are the most common cases where you reach for Awk instead of some other tools? I recently used it to parse and recombine data from the OpenVPN status file. That file has a few differently formatted tables in the same file. Using Awk, I was able to change a variable as each table was encountered, this I could c…

Here is a script that I use to send SMTP mail, via the gawk networking extensions. I have a few different versions, but this is the most basic:

    #!/bin/gawk -f

    BEGIN { smtp="/inet/tcp/0/smtp.yourhost.com/25";
    ORS="\r\n"; r=ARGV[1]; s=ARGV[2]; sbj=ARGV[3]; # /usr/local/bin/awkmail to from subj  0) print                |& smtp

    print "."                               |& smtp; smtp |& getline j; print j
    print "quit"                            |& smtp; smtp |& getline j; print j

    close(smtp) } # /inet/protocol/local-port/remote-host/remote-port
This allows me to bypass the local MTA (if present). The message ID is also returned, which can be useful to log.
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