On Sat, Dec 18, 2010 at 02:35, Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> For whatever reason I've never really gotten my head around awk. ÂI
> intellectually know what it does. ÂI just tend to find other ways of doing
> it instead, using pipes of cut/grep/sed/head/tail and/or shell pattern
> matching constructs such as ${var#pattern} as necessary. ÂEither way
> works, and on single commands or loops repeated a couple dozen times or
> so, coming up with the code in the first place is likely to be the
> bottleneck, but once the loop reps reach triple digits, performance of the
> loop itself begins to matter and each command in a pipe or other compound
> counts, so where awk can be used to avoid strings of several commands,
> it's likely more efficient. ÂSimilarly, bash-internal commands will be
> more efficient than invoking an external program, since an external
> invocation comes with system overhead. ÂThat and the fact that if you're
> running shell you /know/ it's available, but there's always a small chance
> external commands won't be (as can be the case in early boot-scripts), are
> both reasons you often see long strings of bash internals, pattern
> matching based variable manipulation and the like.
>
> The last thought actually helps to explain why I've never seemed to get my
> head around awk in practice, as well, given that like many I suppose, I
> first learned practical shell scripting by studying initscripts. ÂFWIW,
> this is one negative of the fancy new parallel fast-boot init
> replacements, as they tend to replace reasonably transparent and easily
> learned shell scripts with the sources out there for a budding sysadmin to
> explore, with far more opaque compiled
Ha! If it makes you feel any better, I love books and have a hard time
accepting this newfangled TV thing.
--
Dotan Cohen
http://gibberish.co.il
http://what-is-what.com
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