Learning Awk
One of the most useful little tools for information parsing that I’ve used has
to be awk
. Specifically, awk
will allow you to pipe text through it and use
the printf()
function to format text as you require it to be formatted. It
also has a basic scripting language that lends further functionality, making it
an ubiquitous tool in the POSIX arsenal. Need to format a list of US States for
a Maruku table? Not a problem. Copy / Paste it into a text file and pipe it
through this:
|
|
I’ll break that line down for you.
-F\t
tells awk
to separate columns by [tab]
.printf(
begins the print formatting function.%4s
denotes a string padded with four spaces.|
makes Maruku interpret a table column.%-20s
denotes a left-align string padded up to 20 spaces.$1, $2, $3
tells printf()
to use the first, second, and third columns.
It’s really pretty easy. The information goes through stdin()
and exits
stdout()
as per usual, unless you specify otherwise. I highly recommend
reading more about awk
, as you’ll definitely find a use for it once you do.
Ratatat / Ratatat - Cherry