by dietrichepp
11 subcomments
- Awk is still one of my favorite tools because its power is underestimated by nearly everyone I see using it.
ls -l | awk '{print $3}'
That’s typical usage of Awk, where you use it in place of cut because you can’t be bothered to remember the right flags for cut.But… Awk, by itself, can often replace entire pipelines. Reduce your pipeline to a single Awk invocation! The only drawback is that very few people know Awk well enough to do this, and this means that if you write non-trivial Awk code, nobody on your team will be able to read it.
Every once in a while, I write some tool in Awk or figure out how to rewrite some pipeline as Awk. It’s an enrichment activity for me, like those toys they put in animal habitats at the zoo.
- I used to be scared of Awk, and then I read through the appendix / chapters of "More Programming Pearls" (https://www.amazon.com/More-Programming-Pearls-Confessions-C...) and it became a much easier to reason about language.
The structure can be a bit confusing if you've only seen one liners because it has a lot of defaults that kick in when not specified.
The pleasant surprise from learning to use awk was that bpftrace suddenly became much more understandable and easier to write as well, because it's partially inspired by awk.
by cholantesh
0 subcomment
- This was a great read, and the previous post in the series. I see a lot of very convincing arguments here (https://maximullaris.com/awk.html#why) but for me one of the biggest points in favour of python (and I say this is someone who, for learning, will always just reach for C++ because of my muscle memory) is its eminent readability. If I'm writing a script, quite a lot of the time, it's meant not just for myself but for my peers to use with some degree of regularity. I feel pretty confident that there would be much more operational overhead and a lot of time spent explaining internals with awk than with python.
- The portability hit me. I was working a closed corp net that at the time didn't have python and shell was so inconsistent. But awk just worked. Sed was also a really strong tool.
- Nice link to the canonical book on Awk within the first linked page in the article: https://ia903404.us.archive.org/0/items/pdfy-MgN0H1joIoDVoIC...
- Good for extensibility is a claim I've never heard before, I've always found awk's "everything is global scope" as a huge limitation, but if its scripting then I suppose you could just... isolate each script's namespace and take the global namespace as the exported namespace, and since everything is static it really simplifies things further, but lua is still better of course, but if you don't need that much power I suppose it would be even smaller.
- Fun read. I always thought quick calculation like echo $((1+100)) is just a shell feature. Perhaps it was rooted from awk as well.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7
2 subcomments
- AWK is slower than sed
- FreeCell written in AWK:
https://git.luxferre.top/nnfc/
AWK goodies (git clone --recursive) :
https://git.luxferre.top/awk-gold-collection
by 1vuio0pswjnm7
0 subcomment
stat -c %U *
- I am not a programmer, but I have used awk since the 1980's. And normally I would read this type of info or really many things about typical unix tools. I've done a small amount of helpful things with awk (again dating to the 1980's). (Wrote an estimating system using awk and flat txt files as an example).
However given what I've been able to acomplish with Claude Code, I no longer find it necessary to know any details, tips, or tricks, or to really learn anything more (at least for the types of projects I am involved in for my own benefit).
Update: Would love to know why this was downvoted...
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