Learn Awk in Y Minutes

learnxinyminutes.com

12 points·sandwichsphinx··5 comments

AWK is truly a gem. While it has some warts and quirks, it is nevertheless an extremely flexible, performant, and simple scripting language whose omnipresence is a remarkable asset.

It's rather far afield from AWK's normal range of applications, but I recently wrote a portable AWK-hosted interpreter[0] for my own general-purpose scripting language, which provides some handy options for bootstrapping. It would be very interesting to explore building tools like assemblers or even a simple C compiler in AWK.

[0] https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Decker/tree/main/tools/awk/

A couple of times I wrote the same thing in both bash (pure, no externals) and awk just for the heck of it, and the end result was the 2 programs were practically the same.

I didn't expect that!

Maybe I'll dust that off and make it intentional just to see how small I can get the diff. Maybe even manage to make a polyglot.

The biggest difference for general-purpose programming is that AWK supports floating-point arithmetic (and in some implementations arbitrary-precision arithmetic), while bash does not. Shelling out to AWK is a much more portable approach to performing floating-point calculations in bash than "bc" or "dc", since it's available in more environments.

Older versions of bash also have extremely limited or nonexistent support for associative arrays, which can pose challenges compared to AWK. I think AWK has much nicer, less surprising syntax than bash, but that's just a subjective opinion.

Definitely to get power out of bash, you end up with write-only code with half the logic in all the exansions and word splitting hacks.

The small AWK book "The AWK Programming Language" was a great resource on many things :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_AWK_Programming_Language

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