| Sorry I'm late to this, but I'm a big AWK fan, I use it daily and have done so for years. For sysadmin things its great for doing data manipulation in shell scripts. I get that Awkward is a shell, and I can see the use. But it seems very clunky to use. This AWK script was posted in this thread ps | awk 'NR>1{ print $1, $4}'
It takes the output of the PS command, tosses the header away and then prints the value of the first and fourth fields out. This data can be piped to other programs for additional processing.The NR>1 idiom is pretty well known after you look at a few example scripts that use it. To replicate the scrip that the Awkward video uses, it's just ps | awk '{ print $1, $4}'
It's shorter than the Awkward example. I think it's simple, for every line you get from PS print the first set of text and the fourth set of text. Not sure what Awkward would need to do to skip the header.@erikrothoff makes a point about whats the value in knowing AWK over JS. I'd like to think that it gives you a powerful portable tool that can be used as either a stand alone application or as part of a shell script. If you are a Windows user, then it's not going to fit as well, but if you are a Unix/Linux/OS X user, it's a worthy tool to add to your arsenal. The syntax may be "some of the least intuitive code" but investing about 20 minutes can fix that. There are lots of tutorials that can give you a quick leg up. There are also a few "one line AWK scripts" collections that are good samples. One of the most powerful things about AWK is the ability to use regular expressions to see if you want to process the record. The ability to go through a file, pluck out the record(s) and process them is very nice. ps | awk '/astro/ {print $1, $4}'
will give me any user that has astro in it. Not sure how that would work in Awkward. The use of regular expressions like this is what makes AWK a go to language for text processing.Not here to add to the AWK vs Javascript debate, but wanted to add AWK is a powerful tool, having it in your toolbox is a good thing. |