Awk Technical Notes (2023)

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…

My very first job getting paid to write software was writing in scripts in Awk to parse and analyze some software log files, for a faculty software researcher, in, maybe, 1997? i didn't know Awk before, it's just what I inherited. Spent a few hours with the O'Reilly book, and I was like, okay, sure, let's go. As the stuff we were doing in that project got more complex, at some point someone suggested to teenage me "You might want…

Just posted an hour ago, and currently on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35339955