AWK-ward Ruby

If this article has made you more curious about Awk itself, I highly recommend <i>The Awk Programming Language</i> [1] by Aho, Kernighan and Weinberger. It's a terrific book all around (look at the list of authors), and Awk really is worth knowing if you use the command line a lot. (Credit where it's due: silentbicycle always recommends this book, and I read it on his advice. But I seem to have beaten him to this thread.)<p>[1] <a href="http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/awkbook" rel="nofollow">http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/awkbook</a> (This link seems dead at the moment. I'm very much going to hope that's temporary.)

It's nice to see an article that focuses on the common strengths of programming languages, and what came out of them, instead of the usual X vs. Y content. There is often so much common ground (especially between dynamic programming languages) that many solutions and knowledge are easily transferable and could be shared as well, independent from actual code.

Didn't know Ruby (and Perl?) had BEGIN and END... pretty cool. However I would just write the final example as:<p>curl -s <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080.txt" rel="nofollow">http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080.txt</a> | tr ' \t' '\n\n' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n<p>and avoid any kind of procedural programming.

Blocks come from smalltalk too: <a href="http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~harry/musings/SmalltalkOverview.html#Blocks" rel="nofollow">http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~harry/musings/SmalltalkOverview.htm...</a>

Awk is one of those languages in which learning the syntax almost automatically teaches you to think differently. In Awk's case, in terms of tables, maintaining state between rows, and phases in execution while processing data. I find it as much as a mind f<i></i>* as Lisp or Prolog, though in a very workaday unixy sort of way.

This is very cool. It sort of ruins the approach I use when teaching people to program in Ruby or Python where I have them write some code to calculate stats on a text file then show them how trivial it would have been in awk.

Similar Perl/Awk syntax for Python one-liners with BEGIN/END: <a href="http://code.activestate.com/recipes/577075-pyliner-script-to-run-arbitrary-python-code-on-the/?in=user-4119417" rel="nofollow">http://code.activestate.com/recipes/577075-pyliner-script-to...</a>

Nice article. I use AWK and sed all the time. I still prefer writing some piped shell commands in one (sometimes lengthy) line than proper perl/python/ruby script, unless it's really needed. Why? It (paradoxically?) seems more natural to me in shell environments (and often can be done much more quickly that way).<p>Example of AWK usage from my old (currently unmaintained! and insecure!) pcspk project (<a href="http://download.przemoc.net/pcspk" rel="nofollow">http://download.przemoc.net/pcspk</a>) is "Siemens ringtone converter": <a href="https://gist.github.com/943386" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/943386</a> (actually it requires gawk, which has nice extensions)

This is both the most useful and engaging introduction to AWK that I've read <i>and</i> the most intense deprecation signal by showing how to (almost drop-in) replace it with Ruby or Perl, which creates a terrible conflict in me.<p><i>"print $1"</i> was the most I ever used AWK. So when I read the first part (whose examples made great sense to me) I shouted "AWK is awesome! I should learn it now!". Then the last part came in and showed me how I could use a language I already know to precisely replace it. I both feel compelled that I can leverage my current knowledge right now to solve another class of problems, and sad not to learn a completely new thing.

I dare to suggest using $;=/[^a-zA-Z]+/ in the BEGIN block, then you can get away with using only split.each on the second line, and it's more perl-awk-ish :)

Primitive network calculator I once wrote in awk:<p><a href="https://gist.github.com/7bb70e1065f085b46a00" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/7bb70e1065f085b46a00</a>

Is it just me or is the video of the talk at <a href="http://shellhaters.heroku.com/" rel="nofollow">http://shellhaters.heroku.com/</a> broken?<p>On closer examination I noticed the video is here <a href="http://confreaks.net/system/assets/datas/1177/original/363-gogaruco2010-the-shell-hater-s-handbook-small.mp4" rel="nofollow">http://confreaks.net/system/assets/datas/1177/original/363-g...</a>

Simplified C++ inspired by AWK: <a href="http://github.com/lvv/scc" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/lvv/scc</a>

Isn't there an AI course taught somewhere that only uses AWK? Sure I remember reading about that somewhere.

It's Awk, not AWK.<p>So 'ruby -n' acts like Awk? Neat.