Spent about an hour and I see some useful commands that extend past what “cut” can do. But really when dealing with printf() format statements is anyone using awk scripts for this?
Or is everyone just using their familiar scripting language. I’d reach for Python for the problems being presented as useful for awk.
Yes, but for a very specific case. I used to write highly portable scripts that could be executed in different environments (various linux distros, including minimal containers, freebsd and even solaris 10). I couldn’t use bash, perl, python and even gawk. Only POSIX shell (I always tested my scripts with dash and ksh93, for solaris 10 compatibility - with its jsh), portable awk (tested with original-awk, gawk and mawk) and portable sed (better forget it if you need to support solaris).
Before that I didn’t understand why should I need awk if I know perl. And awk really sucks. Once I had to replace a perl one-liner with an awk script of ~30 lines for portability.
P.S. I never use awk just for print $1 as many do. It’s an overkill.
A lot of my work involves writing scripts for systems I do not control, using as light a touch as is realistically possible. I know for a fact Python is NOT installed on many of my targets, and it doesn’t make sense to push out a whole Python environment of my own for something as trivial as string manipulation.
awk is super powerful, but IMHO not powerful enough to justify its complexity, relative to other languages. If you have the freedom to use Python, then I suggest using that for anything advanced. Python skills will serve you better in a wider variety of use cases.
I use it multiple times a day. I only know basic usage, but it’s super useful as part of an awk/grep/sort/uniq pipeline, basically just extracting a field to work on.
You can also add to the output. I use it frequently to pull a list of files, etc, from another file, and then do something like generate another script from that output. This is a weak example, but one I can think of off my head. Not firing up my work laptop to search for better examples until after the holidays. LOL.
awk {‘print "ls -l "$1’}
And then send that to a file that I can then execute.
I learned awk when I was studying and I still use it every now and then. It’s one of those tools that come in really handy at times. I work in Ruby, but there’s still times when scripting or just wanting to process some text when I end up using awk because it makes sense.
Add comment