hdisk VS awk-hack-the-planet

> then people decided perl was bad and moved on from that.

Screw what people think. I found out I like perl. The last thing I wrote is a programmatic partition editor [1] - like how you use sfdisk to zero out the partition, except I wanted to have the MBR and GPT partition table to combine them and make hybrids.

I was fun, and I will use perl again (I may also use awk at one point now that I see how cool it is)

[1] https://github.com/csdvrx/hdisk/

> Bummer you’d been downvoted for that.

Some people have an instinctual dislike of things they've been told it's fashionable to hate. I resent that, because all programming languages are interesting in their own ways.

> It sounds like quite the ambitious project that you’ve nearly got working. Cool!

Oh it's already working, it just needs more polish :)

Check https://github.com/csdvrx/hdisk if you're interested

Actually, I'll try to submit it!

> That is not the sort of thing I’d expect someone to write in Perl, and I’m experiencing an odd mix of “that’s amazing!” and “what on earth were you thinking, my friend?!”

I wanted to do it quickly :)

For decoding weird formats that mix little and big ending, I think perl unpack/unpack is the fastest way.

Also, for computing crc32, I didn't have to bother much :)

Disclaimer: self promotion

If you're looking to get into Awk, and you learn well from a lecture style, I put together a talk for Linux Fest Northwest some years ago and recorded it for Youtube: https://youtu.be/E5aQxIdjT0M

Re awk (which equally has its r/awk), the combination of presentation, exercise and GitHub repo of training data by Benjamin Porter is a nice resource, too.

For people that know Ruby, if you haven't explored Ruby's CLI abilities, you definitely, definitely should. When I was building my (free and open source) awk course[1] I fell in love with awk. When I later found out that Ruby has some of the same features, it changed my life: I

https://robm.me.uk/2013/11/ruby-enp/

https://benoithamelin.tumblr.com/ruby1line/

[1]: https://github.com/FreedomBen/awk-hack-the-planet

Awk: Hack the Planet It has a youtube vid and problems to work through.

Kind of a shameless plug, but you mentioned wanting to get better at Awk. I had that same desire and created a small course based on what I learned. The course got great feedback.

There is a video presentation, and a set of "challenges" you can use to incrementally get more complex with awk, starting from super simple.

The challenges repo is on github here: https://github.com/FreedomBen/awk-hack-the-planet

If you want to watch the videos, there are links in the github repo but for convenience:

Presentation video: https://youtu.be/43BNFcOdBlY

My solutions to exercises video: https://youtu.be/4UGLsRYDfo8