Just one day after Luke Smith's video. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/bph-dbCn3Zzado0.html

2:54 - why bother with cat when you can awk and make the command 8-10 characters longer? I get that awk is an interesting program, but this is absurd. Come on DT, these videos are great but this is silly.

My suggestion is to not waste time showing how a tool can awkwardly emulate another, but what it can do better. Splitting fields is one of the most common uses for awk.

DistroTube vs Luke Smith : Civil War 😂😂

To be fair, Luke specifically was talking about piping cat into grep for standard grep uses, he never proposed it as a replacement for cat in it's whole. Interesting video though!

3D terminal games have been written in Awk. It’s that powerful.

"Why use awk and sed if you can use Perl?" Just kidding, Perl is awesome.

I believe that the Unix philosophy is small single purpose tools that do one thing well. That is why you would use grep instead of awk, not to mention that the grep command line was very much simpler and easier to remember than the awk equivalent. That said, this was a very interesting video on how the same things can be accomplished with different tools.

This video is spot on. Awk is seriously underutilized. One of my favorite commands.

All depends on the task ... and the size of the data-set and the time allowed to do it !!

The cat replacement can be shortened to awk 1 new.sh. I do this instead of cat when I think I will want to perform an action on the file using awk after I view the contents. Now I can recall the last command and simply replace the 1 with the AWK program.

Why use grep when you can just print the file out on a dot matrix printer and use white-out on all the lines you don’t want to see?

Thank you, Derek. "Bloat" is bloat. Use "blo" instead.

Not piping from cat into grep makes sense. Using awk instead of quicker alternatives does not. grep, head, tail, and sed, are shorter and easier to type and give the same results. I bet they complete quicker as well.

This was actually hilarious. Thanks DT

Enough of the bloat you old goat. You don't need Cat or exfat.... a head or sed even if the font is in red. Don't use grep, or WEP and especially don't use zipgrep. In the terminal or youtube as you gawk, while you listen to DT talk He says all you need is AWK. -----Dr. Suess

"This got AWKward."

Some people use TurboTax to file their taxes. I file them with AWK.

Also great way to view firtst few lines using awk. awk ''FNR

Great video... but you answered yourself really. The simplest solution (or more readable) is usually the best one... so which do you prefer to use in a script? This: head file.sh Or this: awk '(NR>=0 && NR ... etc etc about 20 more characters... ' file.sh? Which would be more readable and maintainable while also allowing fellow programmers looking at your code to 'get it' quickly?

why say 'content creator'? Just name Luke Smith. good video apart from that dt

1:40 "why bother with grep? grep is sort of a neat program, but it really only does one thing" have you heard of the unix philosophy?

This video is such a flex that he is literally flexing in the thumbnail, love it!

Yea I think I recall seing this video recently of some boomer talking about using sed instead of cat.

Blargh! Captain Pedantic here... it's not "case insensitive" it's "case indifferent". It's the same difference as "uninterested" and "disinterested".

As an awk lover, this video put a smirk on my face. But seriously, awk really shines when manipulating data in a limited number of potential sources. In real life scenarios, searching through large git/mercurial repos, where there are thousands of source files and a lot more build files, awk is not really your friend. All searching operations will be much much slower than grep. Grep will also be much slower than SilverSearcher or RipGrep, but those tools are not a part of any Gnu/Linux distribution. But you are absolutely on point about replacing sed with awk. Even when awk syntax looks longer, it is more meaningful and readable.

awk is awesome, I use it to update pip installs pip list --outdated | awk 'NR >2 { print $1}' | xargs pip install --upgrade

How would you do to substitute "grep -A" or "grep -B" with awk? cause that something I use a lot in my daily life when I'm extracting data from one particular kind of files I have. Is there any way to do it with awk or any different and more efficient wat than "grep -A/-B"? Thanks!

Only way Luke can redeem himself is if he does a NixOS series

For beginners 'bc', 'cat', 'curl', 'head', 'grep', 'sed', 'tail', 'wc', and 'wget' are easier to learn for text retrieval and processing; the subprocess operator $() comes in handy too. In contrast, 'awk' is a text-processing utility with a built-in programming language. Those 5 utilities plus 'gnuplot' are sufficient for data analysis and much of data science. If programming language constructs such as variables, loops, and user-defined functions are needed, a standard *nix shell like 'bash' provides these features. By the way, I use all of these utilities and sometimes only the full capabilities of ''awk' on a daily basis to perform all stages of the data science workflow, including machine learning. Whether I choose to go awk-less depends on the project. Okay, I am sadistic. By the way, I use Python and R too but when introducing data analysis or the stages of the data science workflow up to exploratory data analysis. The 'bc', 'cat', 'curl', 'head', 'grep', 'sed', 'tail', 'wc', and 'wget' utilities allow for an interactive, step-wise refinement approach known as REPL without the cognitive overhead of programming language constructs.

Awk is like using a sledgehammer to drive in a nail. LoL. I will continue to use cat and grep.

"why use a cap when you can use an umbrella on a sunny day"

I think we need to include all that stuff into systemd )))

Why use head when with an extra 40 characters you can use awk to do the same thing. It took him that long to type out the command he jump cut it.

This was an interesting video. However, if I want the head of a file, I will type: head t.txt not the long awk command you suggested. Have you counted how many keystrokes are involved in the awk command? The awk utility is only to be used for complex operations, which other simpler utilities cannot perform. It is not a replacement for all other commands.

I see where this is going.

I use awk a lot in my scripts. But one thing I wanna do is for example printing from the first column to the end of line. It is very basic thing but I couldn't find the syntax for it. Can you guys help me out?

The reason we use cat at the beginning is that it moves the file being referenced to the start of the line before any processing commands. Otherwise you've got grep followed by a random pattern match, then the file you're processing, often followed by a long sequence of other things. It's easier to read and conceptualise when you have "take file X | search for content y | ..." especially if you're chaining many commands together and later you have more greps or sorts and you switch the mode of their use from including a filename to taking stdin. It makes the $1 stick out and easy to understand rather than burying it somewhere down the commandline.

@DistroTube I was wondering, did you manage to customize stumpwm to the point you could use it or did you lose interest?

Looks like a good to possible replace a lot of grep and sed uses, by when on earth would you replace cat with awk, that's working harder not smarter?

Thanks and learned a lot

BEGIN { print "Luke Smith" } 😉

Have you ever maintain a GNU/Linux package, and which one?

Using awk for everything is surely doable, but sounds like a gimmick to my ear. Interesting, though.

echo "When The Band goes Filing in" | awk '{print substr($1,1,1)substr($2,1,1)substr($5,1,1)}'

Do all the awk commands you showed in this video are POSIX compliant script?

Awk is 671KB, plus 34K for the links from /usr/bin/awk -> /usr/bin/gawk. Cat, grep, sed, head, and tail are 475KB combined. Awk is teh B|0@t!

At some point these classic Unix tools just become verbs for what we want to do - when we just want to dump files as is, or combine several files into one, we achieve that via the verb of 'cat'. When we want to scrape things per line out of a file, we 'grep' it. If we want to scrape, filter/transform a file, we 'awk' it. Even if there were one uber tool that could do all these things, I'd have to create aliases for 'cat', 'grep', 'awk' so those verbs would still be there

using awk it feels like im using dvorak keyboard because of those special letters, eapecially when i need to finish jobs faster, i only use awk for missing features like print. time is gold.

Master this is reveling to me now I'll use AWK for my log and Metadata work.

Why use awk when you can use perl?

Head can be a lot shorter: awk 'NR

Did he just declare war?

or just write your own text parser in c/c++ XD XD XD

I didn't know the "tolower()" parameter in the awk command. I learned it with you. Thanks man. Greetings from Brazil.

It's a tool in the toolbox. It's good to be aware of what the strength of each tool is, and use it in a meaningful way. -Capt. Obvious.

For replacing head, you only need: "awk 'NR

sed 11q is not the same as head it seems. Shouldn't it be sed 10q?

It would be really cool if you showed things awk can do that others can't. It sounds like awk is bringing a sledgehammer to hammer a small nail a lot of the time. It's less characters typically to do something with sed or grep, so when they do the job (which is often) why would you type more characters? I would only use awk when I can't do the same thing faster. Is there any performance difference between these commands?

It's legit to use cat to just print out a file.

awk is great for work with data tables

Well although awk can replace cat or grep even if it's bulkier, saying that it can replace sed is quite a bit statement. I do a lot of parsing using sed quick and simple and I can't see how would you trade this to an awk experience. For splitting lines into columns it's fine though.

The one caveat with replacing grep with awk is that it doesn’t support extended or Perl-like regex the way modern GNU grep does.

Why would you present it like this? now awk seems cool but when your commands are far more verbose to get the same functionality and then advertising as a replacement? It should be advertised as an alt; depending on your use case, it could be more powerful or even slower then one of the other tools in terms of productivity.

War begins .

and now for the bigger question... Y use vi when u got awk, sed, grep and the whole 9 yards or bash utils. nano ftw!

More typing.

*grabs popcorn* I am enjoying seeing Luke and DT go back and forth with these commands. It's like watching an awesome game of chess.

As for head replacement, you can simplify command to "awk '{ if(NR < 11) print; else exit }' new.sh" :)

I think Luke has a point (performance) whereas DistroTube is looking for some topic to talk about

grep -v apple takes 2 seconds max to type letters. awk '!/apple/ {print }' takes 8 seconds minimum. if i use grep 1 week straight, awk will take a month. when i become 90 years old and medicare bill costs me 100k to extend just a month of life. awk? no thx. but agree it does things that grep sed cat is missing.

6:10 "finds every line that contains 'dir' " : $1 finds every line with 'dir' in the first item

Let's say I got 5000 recovered text files in a folder. What do I do to remove text files containing certain text?

2:54 Typing `awk '{ print $0 }' new.sh` is bloat. Just type `awk // new.sh`

Grep is still the least cumbersome and most elegant for every day searches. The bloated commands, sed and awk, are better for more specialized cases. Awk is exceptional when it comes to tabular data.

"We can replace head with awk" 7:37: Me: Nope

Thanks for the comparison but to me it remains more tedious to use awk before ripgrep, grep...you name it..in most cases. Anyway still learned something new, thanks for that.

7:42 How that did appear? What kind of sorcery you are doing? I shall give thee my like Mister Derek Distrotube!

awk '{print $0} (NR==11){exit}' new.sh seems easier to understand and use than what you used for the head example . great video by the way!!

I'm using only awk right now for the Advent of Code. It can really do anything.

I don’t know this channel, and I will never see it again...

% export HE_WHO_MUST_NOT_BE_NAMED="Luke";

I seldom use cat. Usually "less" or "more" for large files, sometimes with grep. The pipe is the Unix way.

Of cause, why would you do 「head new.sh」 when you can just write 「awk '(NR>=0 && NR

Big brain time: trade awk for perl

grep -P is not possible with awk; cat is such a common case it deserves its own program (imagine typing awk '{print}' file*.txt every time). Likewise, how does one implement grep -n port *.cc in awk? (I don't, for example, know how to match the start of a file, necessary to have a per file line number, if multiple files are specified on the command line -- grep -n gives you the filename and line number _in that file_, rather than the line number of all input files concatenated, and this is much more useful than what you can do with awk, before one adds the colour coded output you get from modern grep.)

Pretty soon you'll be browsing the web with awk and curl /s

One less dependency............but a few extra characters to invoke. This is the simplest possible example of a tradeoff in programming I can think of.

So can we concat two files with awk?

How about using the right tool for the job? Usually that's whatever requires the least code.

If you have a long chain of commands, it may assist in readability to cat file | at the beginning.

Something something "awk"ward Yeah I know. I couldn't think of anything clever.

Oh, it's on now...

Why use awk when you can perl or python?

Laughs in busybox

awk ‘{print $0}’ file.txt was even more AWKward than cat file.txt | grep “search”

Why use awk when you can use perl

I don't care what I use, as long as I can get the job done ;)

"grep only does one thing" Linux Axiom "do one thing do it well" 🤔

cat and grep and more and tail are the basis of UNIX systems. Do one thing and do it well. Pipe through the different things you are doing. For me it is easier to remember that cat echoes the file and grep gets the input and filters it in that to remember that grep has all those parameters one of witch is the filename. It sure has ANDs also, yet I use to pipe one grep to another if I am filtering on two conditions. In any case, the examples you give are longer to type and harder to remember that easy cat/grep equivalents. Offtopic: After 30 years of using grep for different piped tasks i discovered "grep -r 'someCodeSnippet'" that looks into a folder and shows you all files and file lines that contains a given text. That is soo usefull, I cannot believe I never used it.