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  • Author Author: colporteur
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When was the last time you used sed and/or awk?

I'm thinking of preparing a lecture, for a High School Computer Club, on the command line tools sed and awk for data manipulation. The discussion will include some examples of using the command to mung a data set. I found the commands valuable over my technology career but wonder how relevant are they today?

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  • Sadly, I've never come across either!

     

    Neil

  • in reply to neilk

    And rarely do they have non-cryptic names.

    There's something for everyone in Linux, worth playing around with (say) a Pi's command line to explore, but finding all the interesting commands can take a lifetime. Just discovered the other day for the first time a command to search for human-readable text among the noise.. called strings

    There's the obscure-sounding troff and groff, useful for converting text into printer format. And myriad other weird commands. nm is very cool, I used to use it a lot.. it searches binary files and tells you the names of all the functions inside.

    One command I wanted, but never found (I'm sure it could be fashioned from sed/awk very easily from those in the know, but I wouldn't know how!) was a command to hunt rows of data that definitely contained text from a 'good list' but to definitely not include the lines from a 'bad list'. The reason being, it would be useful for quickly going through large log files, by first setting up the good and bad lists. The good list could contain (say) "ERROR" and "DEBUG" and the bad list could contain "LEVEL1" and then you'd see only errors or debug lines that were level 2 or higher (for instance). Since it was too hard to figure out with regexp and Linux tools, I did it in C++ using the normal string library.

  • in reply to shabaz

    Interesting fact from the 'AWK' Wiki site, AWK was created at Bell Labs in the 1970s,[6][better source needed] and its name is derived from the surnames of its authors: Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan.

     

    I believe there were a couple more commands which were derived from initials of the developers.

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