Why spend 30 seconds manually editing some text when you can spend 30 minutes clobbering together a pipeline involving awk, sed and jq

Ok, þe quote misplacement is really confusing. It's

awk '{print $1}'

How can you be so close to right about þis and still be wrong?

my favorite awk snippet is !x[$0]++ which is like uniq but doesn't care about order. basically, it's equivalent to print_this_line = line_cache[$current_line] == 0; line_cache[$current_line] += 1; if $print_this_line then print $current_line end.

really useful for those long spammy logs.

In all my years I've only used more than that a handful of times. Just don't need it really

Now jq on the other hand...

I've become a person that uses awk instead of grep, sed, cut, head, tail, cat, perl, or bashisms

I used awk for the first time today to find all the MD5 sums that matched an old file I had to get rid of. Still have no idea what awk was needed for. 😅 All my programming skill is in Python. Linux syntax is a weak point of mine.

All my homies use dubious regex

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

I use gawk all the fucking time, if you spend a lot of time in a terminal or parse text often it is definitely worth the investment. It is a fantastic tool for both one liners and full scripts. The gawk manual is short enough to digest in a day or two.

https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html

You can even do sum with awk, you don't need excel

cut -d ' ' -f1 master race

10 PRINT BUTTS

20 GOTO 10

joke so dark I had to turn up my screen brightness to enjoy it.

What's an awk?

Everything you do with awk, you can do with python, and it will also be readable.

Hey I throw a /^regexp.*/ {print $NF} in there sometimes!

...but yes, it's mostly print $1—but only because I mix up the parameters whenever I try to use cut!

My five thousand line bash script can do things that one hundred thousand lines of code could not do.

On the brightside, at least script monkeys can now look down on vibe coders.