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The Awk Programming Language

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Re: The Awk Programming Language

#151

Post by b3lm0nt »

benhoyt wrote: post #25

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 hav…

Fantastic news. I’ve tried lots of new CLI tools but they always seem to fall between too little functionality (eg. xsv) and too much (VisiData). AWK is just right.

Re: The Awk Programming Language

#152

Post by tomcam »

ryenus wrote: post #147
tomcam wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ben is not just any old technical reviewer. He wrote a version of AWK in go and has done a ton of other work in the AWK ecosystem.

Thanks! ICYMI: GoAWK [1] - A POSIX-compliant AWK interpreter written in Go, with CSV support. [1]: https://github.com/benhoyt/goawk

And it can be embedded in your Go programs as well.

Re: The Awk Programming Language

#153

Post by smitty1e »

lolive wrote: post #127
ac29 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visidata works with arbitrary separators. I just tried with a CSV separated with ␟ (ASCII unit separator) and it worked just fine.

Excel too?

If you have a python installation available, openpyxl[1] is great both for converting to .csv and for packaging .csv outputs as .xlsx (which is really zipped .xml, anyway).

[1] https://openpyxl.readthedocs.io/en/stable/index.html

Re: The Awk Programming Language

#156

Post by dredmorbius »

unmole wrote: post #137
chasil wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWK runs everywhere . Perl and Python do not. Busybox has their own independent AWK implementation. https://busybox.net/ https://frippery.org/busybox/ Also see the first edition of the AWK manual online here: https://archive.org/details/pdfy-MgN0H1joIoDVoIC7

I'm sorry, where does Awk run but Perl and Python don't? If we're counting minimalist implementations, there's micropython that even runs on microcontrollers that cost a less than 2 dollars.

The POSIX standard mandates awk.

It does not mandate Perl or Python.

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/a...>

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/c...>

There are many systems which lack Perl or Python, but include awk.

You might be carrying an Android device at the moment --- if you drop to its default userland, that provides a bunch of utilities, including awk, via Busybox. But not, so far as I'm aware, either Perl or Python.

(You can of course install Termux which will then give you both Perl and Python, along with Node.js, ruby, and a whole slew of other scripting and compiled languages. But so long as we're considering stock installs, it's sed and awk.)

Re: The Awk Programming Language

#157

Post by lost_tourist »

benhoyt wrote: post #118
lost_tourist wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you say the first few chapters are enough to get the 75-80% usefulness for mere mortals like me who will never try to master the full language? Or is the material fairly sprinkled throughout the whole tome?

Yes, definitely. The first three chapters would be more than enough for that: 1) An Awk Tutorial, 2) Awk in Action, and 3) Exploratory Data Analysis. For most people who just want to use AWK for one-liners on the command line, you can stop there. The rest of the chapters are about writing larger (still small! but not one-liner) programs in AWK to create reports, little languages, and experiment with algorithms.

Thanks!

Re: The Awk Programming Language

#158

Post by zimpenfish »

llimllib wrote: post #109
dima55 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you do this sort of thing more than once ever, look at the feedgnuplot tool ( http://github.com/dkogan/feedgnuplot ). It'll make your life easier

Neat! Once you're installing something to do terminal plots though, https://github.com/red-data-tools/YouPlot looks the nicest I've seen. (The nice feature of feedgnuplot of course is that you can _also_ render the plots to images, which youplot can't)

> which youplot can't

But you could feed them through `textimg`[1] to generate PNGs.

[1] https://github.com/jiro4989/textimg

Re: The Awk Programming Language

#159

Post by llimllib »

zimpenfish wrote: post #158
llimllib wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neat! Once you're installing something to do terminal plots though, https://github.com/red-data-tools/YouPlot looks the nicest I've seen. (The nice feature of feedgnuplot of course is that you can _also_ render the plots to images, which youplot can't)

> which youplot can't But you could feed them through `textimg`[1] to generate PNGs. [1] https://github.com/jiro4989/textimg

lol, I love it
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