Fun With Awk

I recently set upon the task of learning awk or gawk, the gnu version of the old unix utility. I’m making a little bit of progress. It’s named after Alfred J. Aho, Peter J. Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan. It was created in 1977 initially. It’s primarily a text-processing language, although it is limited when compared to many of today’s languages, such as perl and python or ruby. Still, it fits a unique niche inside the UNIX command line. It’s very small and handy, and it’s often just the thing for small text processing challenges.

Sometimes it’s used with sed, which is a stream editor. Sometimes each of these lightweight utilities together are just the thing if you want to keep your project small uncomplicated. I’m sure that having said that, there are many experienced users who would point to larger projects that they have used gawk to handle. But at this point in time, awk seems to me too small to use on a project with hundreds of thousands of lines of code. But maybe that’s my limitation?

Anyway, I’m just learning how to write awk scripts from a Lynda.com course. I found I was using awk a fair amount in completing a Udemy course on shell scripting. I’m almost done with that. And the video length of the awk course was less than three hours. But I can tell it’s going to take more than three hours to get very good with awk. Still, I’m working on it.

For example, I should be able to rewrite the shell function that sets up this blog post with awk. Currently, I have the following in my .bashrc that I run when I want to create a post.

# create a blogpost for jekyll in ~/public_html/daveblog/_posts
createpost()
{
  date=$(date --rfc-3339='seconds')
  day=$(date --rfc-3339='date')
  echo "Enter title: "
  read title
  echo "Categories? "
  read categories
  filename="${day}-${title}.markdown"
  directory="$HOME/public_html/daveblog/_posts/"

  cat > $directory/$filename <<End_of_Post
---
layout: post
title: ${title}
date: ${date}
categories: ${categories}
---
End_of_Post
  
echo "Your post ${filename} has been created!"
}

How would I rewrite that just using awk? Not sure, but it might be a fun exercise.

How would I rewrite a number of other functions in my .bashrc using awk? For example, I have a function that finds the CPU in a MacOS or a Linux machine. Also, there’s a function for returning just the IP address from ifconfig. I have something to return a git branch and keep it inside my $PS1 whenever I’m in a git repo. I could create some functions that parsed log files, for example? That checked on remote systems and returned an uptime, for example. I guess if I think about it, there are lots of possibilities.

So what am I waiting for? I’d better get to work!