Linux

47353 readers

1349 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
No misinformation
No NSFW content
No hate speech, bigotry, etc

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

145

Is anyone using awk? (lemmy.world)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

54 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Studying and awk came up.

Spent about an hour and I see some useful commands that extend past what "cut" can do. But really when dealing with printf() format statements is anyone using awk scripts for this?

Or is everyone just using their familiar scripting language. I'd reach for Python for the problems being presented as useful for awk.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Grep is fiiiiine.

sed is okay but a little nasty, when your sed script is longer that one search-replace command you gotta ask yourself what you're doing really (yes, sed is a full-featured Turing-complete programming language, if you go far enough into the man page).

When I see awk in any stackoverflow recipe, I just say 'fuck it' and rewrite the whole thing in Python. Python is included into the minimal system image in Debian, the same as awk, but is way less esoteric, and you can do python -e 'import os, sys; commands;' for a one-liner console script.

And if you want to talk about portability, try writing scripts for Android 4.4 ash shell. There's no [ ] command. You do switch/case to compare strings.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Have you tried ripgrep?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

No, and I don't think I will learn another tool for something that I can already do using grep/sed/find commands, which I know by heart.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

That's fair