I work in HPC and mostly on the shell/console. Without a doubt, the combination of Bash (or another shell) and AWK is truly amazing. Being able to quickly generate statistics, filter out unnecessary information, generate pipelines, etc., is unmatched, and 99% of the time only requires a pipe redirect. Not to sound trendy, but using AWK really is the proverbial "if you know, you know".
One of my favorite use cases is based upon grep with extended regular expressions; there's always a need to search for strings while needing to exclude others, think of a basic example as "grep -E 'this|that' file |grep -Ev 'not(this|that)'". With AWK it's simple, "awk $0 ~ /(this|that)/ && $0 !~ /not(this|that)/' file". Or, if you're monitoring server load averages via a tool like sar, you can pick and choose which loads you want to monitor based upon a threshold, "uptime |awk '$10 ~ /[0-9]{3,}\.[0-9]{1,}/ || $12 ~ /[0-9]{3,}\.[0-9]{1,}/'". This will print matches if the 1 minute or 15 minute load averages are over 100.
Just because it's an "old" language doesn't mean it's obsolete or useless!
> Counterpoint: most shops do not need most of the bespoke cloud services they're using. If you actually do, you should know (or have someone on staff who knows) how to operate it, which negates most of the point of renting it from a cloud provider.
Well said! At $LASTJOB, new management/leadership had blinders on [0][1] and were surrounded by sycophants & "sales engineers". They didn't listen to the staff that actually held the technical/empirical expertise, and still decided to go all in on cloud. Promises were made and not delivered, lots of downtime that affected _all areas of the organization_ [2] which could have been avoided (even post migration), etc. Long story short, money & time were wasted on cloud endeavors for $STACKS that didn't need to be in the cloud to start, and weren't designed to be cloud-based. The best part is that none of the management/leadership/sycophants/"sales engineers" had any shame at all for the decisions that were made.
Don't get me wrong, cloud does serve a purpose and serves that purpose well. But, a lot of people willfully ignore the simple fact that cloud providers are still staffed with on-prem infrastructure run by teams of staff/administrators/engineers.
[0] Indoctrinated by buzz words
[1] We need to compete at "global scale"
[2] Higher education
One of my favorite use cases is based upon grep with extended regular expressions; there's always a need to search for strings while needing to exclude others, think of a basic example as "grep -E 'this|that' file |grep -Ev 'not(this|that)'". With AWK it's simple, "awk $0 ~ /(this|that)/ && $0 !~ /not(this|that)/' file". Or, if you're monitoring server load averages via a tool like sar, you can pick and choose which loads you want to monitor based upon a threshold, "uptime |awk '$10 ~ /[0-9]{3,}\.[0-9]{1,}/ || $12 ~ /[0-9]{3,}\.[0-9]{1,}/'". This will print matches if the 1 minute or 15 minute load averages are over 100.
Just because it's an "old" language doesn't mean it's obsolete or useless!