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An awkward realization (startrek.website)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world
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[–] 13 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Honestly I think 90% of people would never use awk if there was a simple preinstalled command for "print the nth column"

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago* (5 children)

    cut?

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

    To be fair, a lot of the programs don't use a single character, have multiple spaces between fields, and cut doesn't collapse whitespace characters, so you probably want something more like tr -s " "|cut -d" " -f3 if you want behavior like awk's field-splitting.

    $ iostat |grep ^nvme0n1
nvme0n1          29.03       131.52       535.59       730.72    2760247   11240665   15336056
$ iostat |grep ^nvme0n1|awk '{print $3}'
131.38
$ iostat |grep ^nvme0n1|tr -s " "|cut -d" " -f3
131.14
$
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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I never understood why so many bash scripts pipe grep to awk when regex is one of its main strengths.

    Like... Why

    grep ^nvme0n1 | awk '{print $3}'

    over just

    awk '/^nvme0n1/ {print $3}'

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    Because by the time I use awk again, I've completely forgotten that it supports this stuff, and the discoverability is horrendous.

    Though I'd happily fix it if ShellCheck warned against this...

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    This is definitely somewhere that PowerShell shines, all of that is built in and really easy to use

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    People are hating on Powershell way too much. I don't like its syntax really but it has a messy better approach to handling data in the terminal. We have nu and elvish nowadays but MS was really early with the concept and I think they learned from the shortcomings of POSIX compatible shells.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    I really can't stress enough how much power and flexibility comes with an object oriented shell, especially with the dotnet type system behind it.

    I think most people who hate it just do so either because it came from Microsoft (which... Yeah, that's understandable), or because it's a different way of thinking about it (and/or they spent a lot of effort learning how to parse data from strings effectively and hate that it's made easier?). But love or hate it, it is effective and powerful, and I find myself missing that when working with bash.

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