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Okay, I've imagined it. It does seem terrible. Fortunately, that's not a world any of us live in.
by dangerlibrary 10y ago
Okay, I've imagined it. It does seem terrible.
Fortunately, that's not a world any of us live in.
- emodendroket 10y agoOK, but now imagine it's not a database, because there are programs that do act this way.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoAnd those programs usually emit proper CSV. You could use regex to match on what you want, but AWK was literally built for this. It's fantastic, it works great, and if you don't use that tool that was built to solve your problem, that's your own lookout.
- emodendroket 10y agoI don't think awk is actually capable of parsing CSVs in all cases.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoIt doesn't parse escapes, IIRC, but those are rarely emitted.
- PeCaN 10y agoEr, it's a world all of us live in. Say, for example, ‘ps’ or ‘ls -1l’. Then you end up using awk, which is rather like a half-assed version of powershell to work around shortcomings with the unix everything-is-a-string design.
- dangerlibrary 10y agoParent comment was talking about parsing the raw output from a database in stdout. That's what I was responding to, and I'm not wrong.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoAWK isn't a workaround. It's a tool for processing tabular data, in a textual format. The fact that it can solve so many problems is actually a strength of the EIAS design.