Studying and awk came up.
Spent about an hour and I see some useful commands that extend past what “cut” can do. But really when dealing with printf() format statements is anyone using awk scripts for this?
Or is everyone just using their familiar scripting language. I’d reach for Python for the problems being presented as useful for awk.
I use awk all the time, nothing too fancy, but when you need to pull out elements of text it’s usually way easier than using cut.
awk {’ print $3 '} will pull the third element based on your IFS variable (internal field separater, default is whitespace)
awk {’ print $NF ‘} gets you the last element, and awk {’ print $(NF-1) '} gets you one element from the last, and so on.
Basic usage but so fast and easy for so many everyday command line things.
awk is awesome! I love it, and I do not regret learning how to use it.
That said, my workflow invariably always shifts from starting with awk to do something simply with a tiny one-liner, to then doing that with perl or python, and sometimes even creating a file to make the by-now multi-line scripts more easily readable.
I do not recommend starting with awk, if you do not know other languages already such as Python.
In short, let your intuition guide you.
