470
An awkward realization (startrek.website)
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] Sxan@piefed.zip 66 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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?

[-] MalikMuaddibSoong@startrek.website 26 points 1 month ago

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

Honest answer: I’m sloppy on mobile

Better answer:

[-] hddsx@lemmy.ca 15 points 1 month ago

Who downvoted this? If you use awk, you know Sxan is using the correct syntax.

[-] teft@piefed.social 38 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

People have been downvoting him because he uses the letter thorn in his comments.

Some people will hate on anyone different.

[-] mexicancartel@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 points 1 month ago

I recently noticed many people on lemmy have that thing rn. Why are they using it/is that autocorrecty thibgy or something? I didn't downvote them but i hate seeing this. And it's not just this letter

[-] Badabinski@kbin.earth 17 points 1 month ago

I'm not using it because it would be extremely inconvenient for me, but I think that the English language deserves to have the thorn returned to it.

[-] teft@piefed.social 13 points 1 month ago

The english alphabet needs to be completely redone. We should bring back thorn, eth, and wynn. We should also increase the vowels to actually represent the crazy amount of vowel sounds we have, dipthongs are dumb. 5 vowels is not sufficient for 15+ phonemes.

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 month ago

Please no

I have a hard enough time with English already

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] somerandomperson@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 1 month ago
[-] Gutek8134@lemmy.world 12 points 1 month ago

It's going to be fun for etymologists 100 years from now

load more comments (2 replies)
[-] Lauchmelder@feddit.org 63 points 1 month ago

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

[-] CheesyFox@lemmy.sdf.org 20 points 1 month ago

to be fair, out of those three, jq invokes the least existential dread in me

load more comments (5 replies)
[-] grrgyle@slrpnk.net 5 points 1 month ago

Or 60 minutes making it all work just with jq functions.

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] lime@feddit.nu 22 points 1 month ago

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.

load more comments (3 replies)
[-] CubitOom@infosec.pub 19 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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

[-] OpenStars@piefed.social 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The stage of your degeneracy will involve learning PERL.

Edit: one-liners FTW! 😁🐪

[-] SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I could try to learn awk while also trying to debug the annoying problem I'm trying to solve, orrr.... cut and grep it is

sort | uniq -c has entered the chat 🤣

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] tdawg@lemmy.world 19 points 1 month ago

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...

[-] harsh3466@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 month ago

jq is indispensable

[-] otacon239@lemmy.world 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.

[-] Ephera@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 month ago

Probably the very same thing that the post talks about, which is extracting the first word of a line of text.

The output of md5sum looks like this:

> md5sum test.txt
a3cca2b2aa1e3b5b3b5aad99a8529074 test.txt

So, it lists the checksum and then the file name, but you wanted just the checksum.

[-] UltraBlack@lemmy.world 12 points 1 month ago

All my homies use dubious regex

[-] TheGingerNut 12 points 1 month ago

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

[-] OpenStars@piefed.social 15 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)
[-] tal@lemmy.today 15 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

To be fair, a lot of the programs don't use a single character, have multiple spaces between fields, and cut doesn't collapse whitespace characters, so you probably want something more like tr -s " "|cut -d" " -f3 if you want behavior like awk's field-splitting.

$ iostat |grep ^nvme0n1
nvme0n1          29.03       131.52       535.59       730.72    2760247   11240665   15336056
$ iostat |grep ^nvme0n1|awk '{print $3}'
131.38
$ iostat |grep ^nvme0n1|tr -s " "|cut -d" " -f3
131.14
$
[-] TechLich@lemmy.world 9 points 1 month ago

I never understood why so many bash scripts pipe grep to awk when regex is one of its main strengths.

Like... Why

grep ^nvme0n1 | awk '{print $3}'

over just

awk '/^nvme0n1/ {print $3}'

[-] FooBarrington@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Because by the time I use awk again, I've completely forgotten that it supports this stuff, and the discoverability is horrendous.

Though I'd happily fix it if ShellCheck warned against this...

load more comments (2 replies)
[-] laurelraven@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 month ago

This is definitely somewhere that PowerShell shines, all of that is built in and really easy to use

load more comments (2 replies)
[-] cmgvd3lw@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 1 month ago

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

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] h4x0r@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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

[-] bulwark@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago

I remember when I first stumbled across this manual I was trying to look up a quick awk command and wound up reading the whole thing. It's really one of the better GNU manuals.

[-] pelya@lemmy.world 10 points 1 month ago

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

[-] SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 1 month ago

and perl, if you want it less readable

load more comments (2 replies)
[-] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Hmm, but you have to install and run the Python environment for that. AWK is typically present on *NIX systems already. Python seem like overkill for basic text processing tasks.

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] expr@programming.dev 10 points 1 month ago

cut -d ' ' -f1 master race

[-] neuracnu 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

10 PRINT BUTTS

20 GOTO 10

[-] someguy3@lemmy.world 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)
[-] Ephera@lemmy.ml 20 points 1 month ago

It's a Linux command-line program (awk). It's pre-installed practically everywhere, it's very powerful for string processing, but it also uses a fairly complex syntax.

As a result, not many people know how to really make use of it, but awk '{print $1}' is something you encounter fairly quickly when you need to get the first word in each line.

[-] tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden 13 points 1 month ago
[-] ratel@mander.xyz 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

That's where they send you when the syntax drives you insane.

[-] SendMePhotos@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago
[-] driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br 4 points 1 month ago

Amazon Web Keynotes. It's a programming language for server administration.

[-] juliebean@lemmy.zip 7 points 1 month ago
load more comments (2 replies)
[-] grrgyle@slrpnk.net 6 points 1 month ago

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!

[-] Doomsider@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago

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.

load more comments
view more: next ›
this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2025
470 points (100.0% liked)

linuxmemes

27821 readers
1067 users here now

Hint: :q!


Sister communities:


Community rules (click to expand)

1. Follow the site-wide rules

2. Be civil
  • Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
  • Do not harrass or attack users for any reason. This includes using blanket terms, like "every user of thing".
  • Don't get baited into back-and-forth insults. We are not animals.
  • Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
  • Bigotry will not be tolerated.
  • 3. Post Linux-related content
  • Including Unix and BSD.
  • Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of sudo in Windows.
  • No porn, no politics, no trolling or ragebaiting.
  • 4. No recent reposts
  • Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, <loves/tolerates/hates> systemd, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.
  • 5. 🇬🇧 Language/язык/Sprache
  • This is primarily an English-speaking community. 🇬🇧🇦🇺🇺🇸
  • Comments written in other languages are allowed.
  • The substance of a post should be comprehensible for people who only speak English.
  • Titles and post bodies written in other languages will be allowed, but only as long as the above rule is observed.
  • 6. (NEW!) Regarding public figuresWe all have our opinions, and certain public figures can be divisive. Keep in mind that this is a community for memes and light-hearted fun, not for airing grievances or leveling accusations.
  • Keep discussions polite and free of disparagement.
  • We are never in possession of all of the facts. Defamatory comments will not be tolerated.
  • Discussions that get too heated will be locked and offending comments removed.
  •  

    Please report posts and comments that break these rules!


    Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't remove France.

    founded 2 years ago
    MODERATORS