Show HN: An eBook with hundreds of GNU Awk one-liners

Article summary

The author has published an eBook on GNU Awk one-liners, which covers the basics of Awk syntax and provides hundreds of one-liner examples. The eBook is available for free on GitHub, along with other free eBooks on GNU grep, sed, and regular expressions. The author made all their eBooks free due to the pandemic. The GitHub repository includes the eBook in PDF format, example files, and markdown source code.

Main themes

• GNU Awk
• Unix tools
• Portability
• Regular expressions
• Perl vs Awk
• Learning classic tools
• Tool availability and installation
• Scripting and text processing

What commenters say

• GNU Awk is widely available and has significant enhancements over POSIX Awk, making it a worthwhile tool to focus on.
• The portability of Awk is important, and using GNU Awk-specific features can make scripts non-portable.
• Some users prefer Perl over Awk due to its more powerful regular expression capabilities.
• The availability of Awk on most systems, without the need for additional installation or dependencies, is a significant advantage.
• The use of Unix tools like Awk can be seen as brittle and slow, with inconsistent interfaces.
• Others argue that learning classic Unix tools like Awk is still valuable, even with the existence of more modern languages.
• The decision to focus on GNU Awk in the eBook is seen as limiting by some, who would prefer a POSIX Awk version.
• The ability to install GNU Awk on systems where it is not preinstalled is seen as a mitigating factor for its non-universal availability.