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Comment by ajays | Hacker News Reader

Often I find myself dealing with tab-separated files; and cat -n is very handy there.

To see which columns a particular value occurs in:

    awk -F'\t' < tsv-file | tr '\t' '\n' | cat -n | grep something

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FYI you can add line numbers (cat -n behavior) within awk directly as so:

    awk '{print NR, $0}'

The nl command (part of coreutils) is specifically written for numbering lines. It can do simple line numbering, along with various other styles and formats.

Its man page can be seen here: http://linux.die.net/man/1/nl

awk's sprintf can do all of that. Not saying it's the right tool for the job, but the parent did have a pipeline already using awk.

Is there a version of awk that has interesting default behavior when you leave out the program like that?

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