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.
If you work a lot with Linux, you can pretty much count on Perl and awk always being there. So it comes in quite handy to know them.
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…
From what I can tell, Awk really shines in two places, transformation and collation, both of which require some form of structured file. You can transform one structure into another and you can process record by record to some form of collation or summary.
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…
I had to take large CSV files like {question, right_ans, wrong_ans1, wrong_ans2, wrong_ans3} and covert them into SQL insert files. Few caveats - some could be duplicates, some characters were not allowed, and some had formatting issues. The first issue was avoided by upserting, but the other two I used Awk and Sed for and put together a fairly robust script far quicker than if I reached for Python. I probably would have reached for Python if I realised how many edge cases there were but I didn't know that at the start so the script just sort of grew as I went along, but now they're my go-to tools for similar tasks.
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…
Have found static builds of awk useful in low-dependency work. I bundled it with a windows installer to do some wrangling we needed at install time. Another time I was sending packages to a unix cluster, but did not have access myself. Used awk as part of the bootstrap for the package.
I used to write event-driven scripts off it - each line is a message, interpreted by awk. Something I was not able to get working with any of the awks I tried was where you append messages to the file as you are consuming it (this is kind of like code generation). I ended up doing this in python (https://github.com/cratuki/interface_script_py).
I never use Awk until last year. I wanted to monitor an embedded device with little more than bustbox and python on it. There was quite a bit of information in the log files (I had already written a custom log file viewer with some highlighting) but I wanted to monitor in real-time. Somehow I decided to use Awk to monitor the tail of the log file and do realtime bar-graphs by generating appropriate cursor control sequences. In the end I had about 50 lines of Awk to upload to the board and run a command to pipe the log into it - very minimally invasive and very informative.
Would recommend learning Awk with some kind of real-world use of your own. BTW it reminded me of using XSLT which I think is another often overlooked "good thing".
My first and only real use of awk was around 1995. I was working at a new job doing embedded software work at GE and we had a lot of documentation in SGML, written/viewed using Interleaf. Interleaf was super slow on the HP-UX workstations we had and iirc search was even slower. I got the idea to convert all the SGML files into a single HTML file and I reached for awk as I had used it for some one-liners previously. I ended up writing an awk script that generated a frameset with one sidebar frame that was a treeish table of contents and the other frame the mondo html file with anchors for the table of contents. It loaded pretty fast in the HP-UX browser and search was really fast.
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…
I had to take large CSV files like {question, right_ans, wrong_ans1, wrong_ans2, wrong_ans3} and covert them into SQL insert files. Few caveats - some could be duplicates, some characters were not allowed, and some had formatting issues. The first issue was avoided by upserting, but the other two I used Awk and Sed for and put together a fairly robust script far quicker than if I reached for Python. I probably would…
Awk is not really very good at reading complex CSVs (as defined in RFC-4180), where newlines (record separators) can appear within quoted strings. It can be done, but sometimes it's tricky.
The PHP fgetcsv function has been more convenient when I have had more exotic examples.
If the CSV is simple, awk remains a very good tool.
Gawk's ability to extend it with C code is interesting as well, and pretty straightforward. Here's the source for the fork() extension that ships with gawk...it's ~150 lines or so: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gawk.git/tree/extension/fo... I was able to make a (terrible/joke/but-it-kinda-works) web server with gawk using the extensions that ship with it: https://gist.github.com/willurd/5720255#gistcomment-314300…
My opinion that belongs to me is as follows. This is how it goes. The next thing I'm going to say is my opinion.
The C interop and name-spaces (also in gawk) is a bridge too far for me. By the time you need one of those, it's time to look for another language. Awk is just not enough of a language to write serious programs in. And I really like awk. It has enabled great scripting not only for log files, but also for dictionaries, back in the day when it was still hard to load one in memory.
That is my opinion, it is mine, and belongs to me and I own it, and what it is too.
My company mandates Windows but Git Bash has been a backdoor into Unix tools and I've recently learned sed and awk to take full advantage of it. You need to think a bit about your one liners and they'll always feel very hacky, but sed/awk (with a bit of sort thrown in) are an amazingly powerful combination for dealing with all sorts of messy data dumps. In 10 minutes I can craft a one liner that replaces a 2 hours C# console app and runs just as fast. And, surprisingly, I often find it easier to go back months later and understand the messy looking one liner than the nicely formatted, well commented, unit tested console app.