Also I don't think that it's so much easier to use than cut. On the other hand every *nix system has cut so if you make scripts with it they are portable.
Because 99% of awk IRL use is just as a fancier cut.
It's very rare someone even sets a variable using awk. If you do it, you are a statistical rarity.
> Also I don't think that it's so much easier to use than cut. On the other hand every *nix system has cut so if you make scripts with it they are portable.
I, for one, never remember the syntax for cut. If "choose" gets a deb, I'll use it: Python slicing is something familiar to me.
I don't care if cut is on every unix system: if I have the possibility to install things on the machine, then I'll just install what I need. I have a script for that. If I don't, I'll google/man/--help GNU commands as usual.
And as for writing shell scripts, I use Python anyway.
You say "fancier", I say "working": since cut can't work on general whitespace without a pre-processing phase (e.g. tr), it simply doesn't work for the vast majority of the things I try to shove into it, and I pretty much always end up using awk instead.
Choose means my awk use will fall down by 99% or so.
In fact, anybody promoting cut, please give me the cut version of:
echo -e "foo bar baz" | choose -1 -2
The oneliner is going to be... interesting.
Now you can do it with awk using:
echo -e "foo bar baz" | awk '{ print $NF " " $(NF-1)}'
Choose is what cut should have been.
`echo -e "foo bar baz" | tr -s ' ' | rev | cut -d ' ' -f 1-2 | rev | awk '{print $2 " " $1}`
Everything except the awk part is something that I use all the time and is easy to type & remember.
To be honest I'd use `choose` if it was available everywhere, but for string manipulation I can't justify using nonstandard tools since they aren't always available.
Every now and then there are some new ones I actually start to use. For example `ripgrep` mostly replaced `grep -R` for me some time ago, a lot of it has to do with the fact that if `rg` is not found I can fallback to normal grep and get the same result, just a bit slower.
I guess my point is that while I do appreciate innovation & making better tooling, the hard part always is getting the tool where it's most needed.
echo ... |while read a b x ;do ... ;done
Only FreeBSD, and it's somewhat recent (it was apparently added in 2012, in 9.2, so it's not in osx either).
This actually makes choose a cut-killer for me. It can be frustrating having to figure out which delimiters to use - tabs or spaces? If spaces, you'll have to chain it with tr, or resort to awk.