4 ms·

I bought an awk book and read it. Didn't see the point of the language any more. I have regexps if I need them, python if I need more. I rarely do much textual

• bambataa 6y ago
  Yes, the only time I come across Awk now is as part of some shell pipeline. It just seems to have been crowded out of lots of places. I still think it’s cool though.
• Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  Often old *nix tools are disparaged here by professional software developers. But not everyone is working in software development professionally, and not everyone needs sexy qualifications in other tools. As an ordinary person whose day job is in the humanities, learning awk, sed, Emacs Lisp and other such tools has allowed me to quickly solve tasks that would have taken me ages to do manually. These tools have docs that are very accessible to the ordinary computer user (after all, they were conceived as something that clerical staff could be trained in). I am happy these tools are still around and I think they should be more widely known.
• jimbokun 6y ago
  > I rarely do much textual data munging anyway. Well, since that is pretty much AWK's entire reason for being, of course you don't have a use for it. > That's what DBs are for, or similar tools. But if you have a text file with a lot of semi-structured data and just need to answer a few questions, using AWK will almost always be faster than designing a schema and importing into a database first, before answering the question. Oh, and want to know a really good tool for getting data from a text file into a database? AWK! > Awk won't help get you hired AWK just lets you accomplish many tasks quickly and without fuss that can create value for your company, and those are things that can go on your resume. At some point in your career, pointing to specific things you have accomplished becomes more important than the keywords on your resume.
  • throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
    > using AWK will almost always be faster than designing a schema and importing into a database first I have never had to do that with unstructured data - ah wait, I lie! I pulled data off the covid wiki page, a quick emacs regexping, a bit of macrology, pasted it into a spreadsheet (libreoffice recognises it's tab or whatever separated) and bingo, you're off. > Oh, and want to know a really good tool for getting data from a text file into a database? AWK! For smallish amounts, I use emacs regexps. For data too large for emacs, I'd probably use python. > and without fuss that can create value for your company, and those are things that can go on your resume. That's not how it works any more. They look for skills. They should not, they should do as you say, but seems not any more. > specific things you have accomplished becomes more important than the keywords on your resume again, no. Believe me, I have a track record of delivering, but all my job agents do is match by skills. And that's what their clients want. It's depressing. So I disagree but thanks anyway
    • srean 6y ago
      For large data why do you use Python and not C++ or Haskell ? They can do anything that Python can do. What's that you said, 'convenience and specialization', ah I see, that thought never occurred to me. May be that's why I reach for AWK over Python.
    • davidgould 6y ago
      Awk, particularly mawk, is several times faster than python for a lot of file ripping tasks. If I had several billion lines of data to reformat or summarize, I'd almost always reach for awk before python.
    • jimbokun 6y ago
      > a quick emacs regexping, a bit of macrology, pasted it into a spreadsheet (libreoffice recognises it's tab or whatever separated) and bingo, you're off. It's very likely that, if you knew AWK well, you could have completed this task faster. > Believe me, I have a track record of delivering, but all my job agents do is match by skills. And that's what their clients want. It's hard to find the few companies that actually prioritize results, but it's worth it.