Ask HN: What is the most amazing Awk program you've used | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the most amazing Awk program you've used

13 pointsAstroJetson4 comments

I've been an AWK user since Unix Version 7, its been my Swiss Army Knife for decades (at times becoming a Swiss Army Hammer) I've used it to build a computer billing system. I worked at a company that gobbled smaller companies during the M&A boom times, AWK saved me merging cruft data into our master systems. I've even run an AWK webserver to do quick shares of data.

The recent post of a AWK program that is a GIT CLI tool moved it into the most amazing AWK program for me.

I know that Henry Spencer build a text processor and an assembler in AWK (30K lines).

What is the most amazing AWK program you've heard about / used?

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I don't know about amazing, but an AWK program builds my website. Don't blame the programming language for the crappy HTML, that's completely my fault. I learned HTML1 and never really progressed, except in dribs-and-drabs.

Still, the code runs and does a pretty good job of executing the algorithm I gave it.

But I wouldn't call it amazing. Most of my AWK is small, few-liners.

I do have a story about learning the power of associative arrays, but that should be a separate post.

Pseudo-3D shooter written completely in gawk using raycasting technique: https://github.com/TheMozg/awk-raycaster

See also this list of projects: https://github.com/freznicek/awesome-awk?tab=readme-ov-file#...

Speaking of AWK and Henry Spencer, let me quote from the awf readme:

This is awf, the Amazingly Workable Formatter -- a "nroff -man" or (subset) "nroff -ms" clone written entirely in (old) awk.

It is slow and has many restrictions, but does a decent job on most manual pages and simple -ms documents, and isn't subject to AT&T's brain-damaged licensing that denies many System V users any text formatter at all. It is also a text formatter that is simple enough to be tinkered with, for people who want to experiment.

Type "make r" to run a regression test, formatting the manual page (awf.1) and comparing it to a preformatted copy (awf.1.out). Type "make install" to install it. Pathnames may need changing.

I don't know whether awf will run on 16-bit machines. Data requirements are modest, but I fear the programs are probably big enough to run awk out of space.

I can't believe I really wrote this.

Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology

henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry

13 July 1990

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(n.b. the first release of groff was June 1990)

Somebody posted a git client written in awk here on hacker news today.

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