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Using sed to make indexes for books (1997)

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Re: Using sed to make indexes for books (1997)

#11

Post by inigyou »

janandonly wrote: post #2

Two thought: 1. I feel the use of AWK, SED, GREP and Bash (to name a few) is general waning. I rarely see it outside of HN posts. I wish I were better at using it. Sometimes for a special need I’ll ask a LLM to write me a script in bash just to keep this spirit alive. 2. On the other hand, I’ve written a book and added an index by using Microsoft Word, and it was basically pretty easy to add. I don’t know why I shoul…

They should really be considered obsolete beyond very basic tasks. They have been obsoleted by short Python scripts.

Re: Using sed to make indexes for books (1997)

#12

Post by lemonwaterlime »

janandonly wrote: post #2

Two thought: 1. I feel the use of AWK, SED, GREP and Bash (to name a few) is general waning. I rarely see it outside of HN posts. I wish I were better at using it. Sometimes for a special need I’ll ask a LLM to write me a script in bash just to keep this spirit alive. 2. On the other hand, I’ve written a book and added an index by using Microsoft Word, and it was basically pretty easy to add. I don’t know why I shoul…

I use those tools nearly every day. Instead of heavy LSPs and IDEs using the RAM that could be otherwise used, I grep and ctags through my codebase for instant navigation. For deterministic changes if I haven’t already done it in vim, I awk and sed, though usually I do buffer-wide changes in vim for such things. When troubleshooting CLI outputs, especially for binutils and other tools I didn’t write, I still use combinations of awk, sed, and grep.

Not everything is thrown together code churn. Some tools have earned their keep and don’t need to be in the constant spotlight because they do their job silently and effectively for people such as myself on a daily basis.

Re: Using sed to make indexes for books (1997)

#13

Post by ggm »

I used awk and eqn and t/roff to make a university phone book in the late 80s and early 90s. I was set the task of mimicing the hand-set phototypsetter version from a printout listing. I needed EQN to make giant ellipsis across groups of names who shared a phone, and had to tune macros to use to get n column output to work with the gutter needs of the new bitstream bromide making machine.

Re: Using sed to make indexes for books (1997)

#14

Post by hulitu »

inigyou wrote: post #11
janandonly wrote: post #2

Two thought: 1. I feel the use of AWK, SED, GREP and Bash (to name a few) is general waning. I rarely see it outside of HN posts. I wish I were better at using it. Sometimes for a special need I’ll ask a LLM to write me a script in bash just to keep this spirit alive. 2. On the other hand, I’ve written a book and added an index by using Microsoft Word, and it was basically pretty easy to add. I don’t know why I shoul…

They should really be considered obsolete beyond very basic tasks. They have been obsoleted by short Python scripts.

Hopefully someone will make a linux distribution with Python as the shell instead of bash. For Python fans. /s

Re: Using sed to make indexes for books (1997)

#15

Post by pseudohadamard »

ggm wrote: post #13

I used awk and eqn and t/roff to make a university phone book in the late 80s and early 90s. I was set the task of mimicing the hand-set phototypsetter version from a printout listing. I needed EQN to make giant ellipsis across groups of names who shared a phone, and had to tune macros to use to get n column output to work with the gutter needs of the new bitstream bromide making machine.

I used sed to compile YAML. Bit of AWK in there too but mostly sed.

Re: Using sed to make indexes for books (1997)

#17

Post by dekdrop »

inigyou wrote: post #11
janandonly wrote: post #2

Two thought: 1. I feel the use of AWK, SED, GREP and Bash (to name a few) is general waning. I rarely see it outside of HN posts. I wish I were better at using it. Sometimes for a special need I’ll ask a LLM to write me a script in bash just to keep this spirit alive. 2. On the other hand, I’ve written a book and added an index by using Microsoft Word, and it was basically pretty easy to add. I don’t know why I shoul…

They should really be considered obsolete beyond very basic tasks. They have been obsoleted by short Python scripts.

Python is obsolete too. It's only there for those not wanting to get performance and typiy
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