dontsayaword comments on What are some of your most useful or favorite terminal commands?

[–] dontsayaword@piefed.social 4 points 10 months ago* (3 children)

I usually use something like awk '{print $2}' to get a bit of some output

Ex: list processes, grep for the line I want, then awk out the chunk I want from that line (the pid):

ps aux | grep myprogram | awk '{print $2}'

permalink

fedilink

source

parent

hideshow 3 child comments

[–] hallettj@leminal.space 4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

That's the only think I know how to do with awk, and I reach for it a lot! cut is purpose-built for that function, and is supposedly easier to understand; but it doesn't seem to just work like awk does.

permalink

fedilink

source

parent

hideshow 2 child comments

[–] victorz@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago (1 child)

I think cut is a little bit finicky because two consecutive occurrences of the cell delimiter counts, and gives an empty cell when selecting the index between them.

choose is a bit better at this from what I remember, which is like the modern cut, I believe, of course written in Rust.

Otherwise Nushell excels at this sort of thing, although I don't really use it.

permalink

fedilink

source

parent

hideshow 1 child comment

[–] hallettj@leminal.space 2 points 10 months ago

Oh, I hadn't heard about choose!

I have been using Nushell, and you're right, it is great at parsing input. Commands like detect columns and parse are very nice, and have been supplanting awk for me.

permalink

fedilink

source

parent