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Comment by aseure | Hacker News Reader

I would also recommend the good awk blog post series of Jonathan Palardy:

  * http://blog.jpalardy.com/posts/why-learn-awk/
  * http://blog.jpalardy.com/posts/awk-tutorial-part-1/
  * http://blog.jpalardy.com/posts/awk-tutorial-part-2/
  * http://blog.jpalardy.com/posts/awk-tutorial-part-3/

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glanced a bit, looks good.. will add it to further reading section, thanks :)

has some minor issues though

> modern (i.e. Perl) regular expressions

nope, supports only ERE.. doesn't have non-greedy, lookarounds, etc

> $ cat netflix.tsv | awk '{printf "%s %15s %.1f\n", $1, $6, $5}' | sed 1d

could have just added NR>1 condition..

Yeah that’s really tough for me. PCRE really sets the bar for modern regular expression engines. Awk predates it by a decade.

TWO decades!

Not to mention that awk takes filename arguments, so this is an egregiously useless use of cat.

From the second post,

> Alternatively, awk '{print $2}' netflix.tsv would have given us the same result. For this tutorial, I use cat to visually separate the input data from the AWK program itself. This also emphasizes that AWK can treat any input and not just existing files.

Not to mention this is the point of the < operator.

Thanks to you... and OP! I have been using posix systems for years but never really touched awk because what I have seen have seemed like archaic chants of dark magic, very good resources for learning about this nifty tool.

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