Learn just a little Awk (2010)

Recently, I was helping out a friend in analyzing some RNA samples for her work. These samples are huge - like nearly a gigabyte of data. There was this tool which was recommended for the job - mirexpress. It was a small job, perhaps 10 minutes worth of effort. To make my work easier, I provisioned a beefy (and costly) machine on Azure to do the job, took a quick look at the clock (it said 11 PM), ran the…

I don't write much Awk code any more, but at one time it was my favorite programming language, and not just for little one-liners. A while ago I ran across a couple of my old Awk programs and uploaded them to GitHub. One is an implementation of Mark V. Shaney (the infamous Markov chain program), the other takes source code and prints it out in a nice "two up" landscape format on a LaserJet II, including graphical boxes to replace…

I used awk 20 years back. Then I moved on. My awk scripts still run, those in other languages don't (major version changes e.g.). Also, I began manipulating text using grep, cut, sed and sort, but found that these read through the file each time, becoming slow as data increases. Using awk you can search, filter and manipulate data in ONE iteration of the file making it very fast. And so i once again brushed up on awk. btw, i…

Back in the 80s I wrote a 500-line program analysis tool in Awk. One day the woman I was going out with handed me a printout I had left at her place, saying something along the lines of "here's your awk code". She wasn't a programmer so I was stunned that she knew it was Awk, and very impressed too. Years later I ran into Brian Kernighan at a conference and told him the story, ending it with "and that's…