This sounds interesting. Could you give an example where you rewrote a pipeline in awk?
This pipeline may be significantly reduced by replacing cut's with awk, accommodating grep within awk and using awk's gsub in place of tr.
$ echo token:abc:def | grep -E ^token | cut -d: -f2
abc
$ echo token:abc:def | awk -F: '/^token/ { print $2 }'
abc
$ echo $CSV
foo:24
bar:15
baz:49
$ echo $CSV | awk -F: '$2 > 20 { print $1 }'
foo
baz //d
awk -F'//d[[:space:]]*' 'NF > 1 {print FILENAME ":" FNR " " $2}' source/*.c
(IMO, easier still to configure your editor to support breakpoints, but I’m not the one who chose to do it this way.)
Would you have //d<0xA0>rest of comment?
Or some fancy Unicode space made using several UTF-8 bytes?
If tabs are supported,
[ \t]
[[:space:]]
[_\t\v\f\r]
The resulting character class does exactly the same thing under any locale.
The isblank function tests for any character that is a standard blank character or is one of a locale-specific set of characters for which isspace is true and that is used to separate words within a line of text. The standard blank characters are the following: space (’ ’), and horizontal tab (’\t’). In the "C" locale, isblank returns true only for the standard blank characters.
[:blank:] is only the same thing as [\t ] (tab space) if you run your scripts and Awk and everything in the "C" locale.
Because it’s the one I remembered first, it worked, and I didn’t think that it needed any improvement. In fact, I still don’t think it needs any improvement.