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This is normal. Really. Lately I’ve taking to using awk for all my shell programming tasks. Awk is wonderful. Want to only output lines of text where 25 is in the 6th column of text? Sure thing:

awk ' ~ /25/'

How about something complicated? You want to take a unix epoch timestamp followed by an IP address and two columns of bytes which you’d like summed, and would really like the output to be formatted prettily. Oh, and the data is seperated by commas. Sure thing…

awk -F, 'OFS="t"; print strftime("%c",),,+}'

I mean, really. It’s so ridiculously easy and convienant that I don’t know why everyone isn’t using it for all their text formatting needs.

6 Responses to “Stop awk’ing at me”

    Maybe because I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.

    Just a thought.

    Probably. Call it a geek joke. And a really horrible one at that. Believe me, you’re saner for not understanding it.

    Don’t worry, Shannon, even a lot of geeks (like me) don’t understand it. It’s the computer equivalent of cuniform.

    Uh, wow. That was foreign language.

    Interesting that you’re geeky enough to use awk and un-geeky enough to ignore my half-assed communication that I don’t have an account to access webmail on the rack. Who are you and what did you do with Jordan?

    I thought you would like this john…

    http://images.ucomics.com/comics/bo/2003/bo030514.gif