Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 27th May 2008 13:08 UTC, submitted by Ward D
AWK is one of the most common UNIX tools to process text-based data in either files or datastreams. Written by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan, AWK "extensively uses the string datatype, associative arrays (that is, arrays indexed by key strings), and regular expressions." ComputerWorld interviewed Alfred Aho.
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Member since:
2006-10-08
Oh how I love these articles. =^_^=
I can only agree to that. Even today - why "even"? - awk is one of the tools I use. For example, I just wrote a simple awk script to convert a csv (comma seperated values) list file into a HTML and a LaTeX fragment. No big deal. Why? First of all, awk comes with my OS, I don't need to install anything (I'm using FreeBSD), no fat dependencies, and a great man page. And if you are familiar with C and know how to formulate regular expressions (as you need them), awk is a fast helper.
There are other great tools, little tools that simply do their job, just to mention a few: sed, grep, cut.
Yes! :-)
Match? Fire! Next.
By "match" you can attach actions to regex patterns of other conditions (e. g. line counters).
!/^#/ && (length != 0 || dings > 50) {
_____gsub($1 $2 bla bla bla);
_____pups = sprintf("zeux %dies %das %jenes", uhu, kram);
_____printf("bla", pups, furz);
_____dings++;
}
# And now for something completely different.