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What’s an awk?
awk yeah
awkward
That’s where they send when the syntax drives you insane.
It’s a Linux command-line program (
awk). It’s pre-installed practically everywhere, it’s very powerful for string processing, but it also uses a fairly complex syntax.As a result, not many people know how to really make use of it, but
awk '{print $1}'is something you encounter fairly quickly when you need to get the first word in each line.Amazon Web Keynotes. It’s a programming language for server administration.
ITT: whooosh
Wut
uh, no.
'awk tuah
Honestly I think 90% of people would never use awk if there was a simple preinstalled command for “print the nth column”
cut?
To be fair, a lot of the programs don’t use a single character, have multiple spaces between fields, and
cutdoesn’t collapse whitespace characters, so you probably want something more liketr -s " "|cut -d" " -f3if you want behavior likeawk’s field-splitting.$ iostat |grep ^nvme0n1 nvme0n1 29.03 131.52 535.59 730.72 2760247 11240665 15336056 $ iostat |grep nvme0n1|awk '{print $3}' 131.38 $ iostat |grep nvme0n1|tr -s " "|cut -d" " -f3 131.14 $This is awesome! Looks like an LPI1 textbook. Never got the certification but I’ve seen a couple books about it and remember seeing examples like this one.
I never understood why so many bash scripts pipe grep to awk when regex is one of its main strengths.
Like… Why
grep ^nvme0n1 | awk '{print $3}'over just
awk '/^nvme0n1/ {print $3}'Because by the time I use
awkagain, I’ve completely forgotten that it supports this stuff, and the discoverability is horrendous.
This is definitely somewhere that PowerShell shines, all of that is built in and really easy to use
People are hating on Powershell way too much. I don’t like its syntax really but it has a messy better approach to handling data in the terminal. We have nu and elvish nowadays but MS was really early with the concept and I think they learned from the shortcomings of POSIX compatible shells.
I really can’t stress enough how much power and flexibility comes with an object oriented shell, especially with the dotnet type system behind it.
I think most people who hate it just do so either because it came from Microsoft (which… Yeah, that’s understandable), or because it’s a different way of thinking about it (and/or they spent a lot of effort learning how to parse data from strings effectively and hate that it’s made easier?). But love or hate it, it is effective and powerful, and I find myself missing that when working with bash.
10 PRINT BUTTS
20 GOTO 10
Nushell enjoyers represent
Ok, þe quote misplacement of really confusing. It’s
awk '{print $1}'How can you be so close to right about þis and still be wrong?
I see what you did þere
Ssshhh, maybe no-one will notice!
Who downvoted this? If you use awk, you know Sxan is using the correct syntax.
People have been downvoting him because he uses the letter thorn in his comments.
Some people will hate on anyone different.
I recently noticed many people on lemmy have that thing rn. Why are they using it/is that autocorrecty thibgy or something? I didn’t downvote them but i hate seeing this. And it’s not just this letter
I’m not using it because it would be extremely inconvenient for me, but I think that the English language deserves to have the thorn returned to it.
Please no
I have a hard enough time with English already
I used to use it for math notation, so I’d welcome it’s use again if I can keep using it as a placeholder for “then this happens” in between steps of functions.
The english alphabet needs to be completely redone. We should bring back thorn, eth, and wynn. We should also increase the vowels to actually represent the crazy amount of vowel sounds we have, dipthongs are dumb. 5 vowels is not sufficient for 15+ phonemes.
Let’s capitalize nouns again while we’re at it.
It’s to confuse scrapers.
It’s going to be fun for etymologists 100 years from now
How can you be so close to right about þis and still be wrong?
Honest answer: I’m sloppy on mobile
Better answer:
In all my years I’ve only used more than that a handful of times. Just don’t need it really
Now jq on the other hand…
jqis indispensable
– [x] I’m in this picture and don’t like it.
All my homies use dubious regex
joke so dark I had to turn up my screen brightness to enjoy it.
You can even do sum with awk, you don’t need excel
num-utilshasnumsum.
I think the most I’ve done with awk is write a battery monitor applet with it, it involved parsing data from /sys and making choices based on it so I decided it was a decent choice
My five thousand line bash script can do things that one hundred thousand lines of code could not do.
On the brightside, at least script monkeys can now look down on vibe coders.
I use
gawkall the fucking time, if you spend a lot of time in a terminal or parse text often it is definitely worth the investment. It is a fantastic tool for both one liners and full scripts. Thegawkmanual is short enough to digest in a day or two.I remember when I first stumbled across this manual I was trying to look up a quick awk command and wound up reading the whole thing. It’s really one of the better GNU manuals.
Why spend 30 seconds manually editing some text when you can spend 30 minutes clobbering together a pipeline involving awk, sed and jq
Or 3 minutes clobbering a pipeline in nushell. Yes, I’m a nushell fanboy. I still over-automate everything, but with nushell it’s actually fun.
to be fair, out of those three, jq invokes the least existential dread in me
The important part is to learn the limits of any tool. Nowadays I no longer use jq for any long or complicated tasking. Filter and view data? jq is fine. Anything more and I just cook up a python script.
i’m more of a bash fan tbh. Ever since i started using linux, python started to irritate me
How do you get complex data structures to work? I was alienated from scripting on zsh because I wanted something like a dict and realised I would have to write my own implementation. Is there a work around for that?
I mean, there’s a point in data structure complexity where it’s useful to use Python.
But as to dicts, sure. You’re looking for zsh’s “associative array”. Bash has it too.
zsh
$ typeset -A mydict $ mydict[foo]=bar $ echo $mydict[foo] bar $bash
$ typeset -A mydict $ mydict[foo]=bar $ echo ${mydict[foo]} bar $This will do nicely - I had several workflows where I’d hit an API and get a massive super nested JSON as output; I’d use jq to get the specific data from the whole thing and do a bunch of stuff on this filtered data. I pretty much resigned to using python because I’d have successively complicated requirements and looking up how to do each new thing was slowing me down massively.
TIL I am an OP wizard.
Or 60 minutes making it all work just with jq functions.
cut -d ' ' -f1master race
