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Comment by schoen | Hacker News Reader

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schoen

> Quick, easy. In a *nix shell that would be very tricky.

You'd probably need to make an explicit SQL query since you wouldn't have the database integration.

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Well, yeah, but I mean the concept (grepping in tabular data).

If, hypothetically, bash had database integration, ls Columns would probably return something like

  foo	varchar	30	NOT NULL
  bar	decimal	 8
  baz	int	 4

Which would be a royal PITA to search for anything in—if I were to search for ‘int’ I'd get all int columns and any columns with int in the name….

I could've used an example involving process lists, but I didn't want to trigger PTSD in anyone who's had to grep the output of ‘ps’ for anything non-trivial. (Plus, the database thing was something I actually did a few days ago.)

But thats why there are tools like awk.

awk is rather similar in many ways to powershell, actually, but untyped. I agree most of what powershell does you can do with awk, but it's often less pleasant than powershell (in my experience).

ps aggregates /proc info for human viewing. Why grep the formatted output rather than the source data?

Maybe on Linux. OpenBSD doesn't even have procfs, FreeBSD deprecated it, DragonFlyBSD doesn't mount it by default.

/proc is a race condition waiting to happen, so I can't really say I recommend using that.

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