Understanding Awk

• csvinfo

  1 3 0.0 Rust

  A small util to show max column lengths for a passed CSV file.

A long while ago I wrote up a little processor to determine field lengths in a given file - I forgot the original reason. ( https://github.com/sullivant/csvinfo )

However, I feel I really should have taken the time to learn Awk better as it could probably be done there, and simply! (It was a good excuse to tinker with rust, but that's an aside.)

• busybox-w32

  16 640 9.2 C

  WIN32 native port of BusyBox.

The problem is that awk is in POSIX, and perl is not.

There are two common sources of awk for Windows, for example, that drop one exe to provide the interpreter:

http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/

https://frippery.org/busybox/

Perl simply wasn't designed to do that.

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• awk

  2 5 10.0 Awk

  Random AWK code (by geary)

I used to love Awk! I still do, even if I don't use it much any more.

Awk has a reputation for being hard to read (as noted in stevebmark's comment), but when I was using it actively, I tried to treat it as a serious programming language and write readable programs in it.

Several years ago I tracked down a couple of my old Awk programs from around 1990 and posted them here:

https://github.com/geary/awk

SHANEY.AWK is an implementation of the infamous Mark V. Shaney:

https://www.clear.rice.edu/comp200/09fall/textriff/sci_am_pa...

This was probably the first program that made me really impressed with Awk. People were writing rather complicated Shaney implementations in C, and I thought, "this could be really simple in Awk." And it was!

LJPII.AWK is the Awk program I'm most proud of. This was in the days when we had tiny screens and no multiple monitors and you always printed out your code to read it. In my circles we also fond of inserting "separator lines" between functions, in various formats such as this one:

  // - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

• Awk-Batteries

  8 12 1.8 Awk

  Public AWK Directory

• csvquote

  3 442 1.9 C

  Enables common unix utlities like cut, awk, wc, head to work correctly with csv data containing delimiters and newlines

There is a small program I wrote called csvquote[1] that can be used to sanitize input to awk so it can rely on delimiter characters (commas) to always mean delimiters. The results from awk then get piped through the same program at the end to restore the commas inside the field values.

Also works for other text processing tools like cut, sed, sort, etc.

[1] https://github.com/dbro/csvquote

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