[TUHS] cut, paste, join, etc.

Tomasz Rola rtomek at ceti.pl
Mon Feb 22 15:57:17 AEST 2021


On Tue, Feb 16, 2021 at 08:26:11PM -0600, Will Senn wrote:
[...]
> Oops. That's right, no username & password, but you still need to
> bring it up and interact with it... accept, as you say, you can
> enter your sql as an argument to the executable. OK, I suppose ...
> grump, grump... Not quite what I was thinking, but I'd be hard
> pressed to argue the difference between creating a handful of files
> in the filesystem (vs tables in sqlite) and then using some unix
> filter utilities to access and combine the file relations (vs
> passing sql to sqlite) other than, it'd be fun if there were select,
> col, row (grep?), join (inner, outer, natural), utils that worked
> with text without the need to worry about the finickiness of the
> database (don't stone me as a database unbeliever, I've used plenty
> in my day).

I am not sure if this is what you are looking for, but sections 3 and
4 of "The AWK Programming Language" (by Aho, Kernighan and Weinberger)
have a description of very nice data processing scripts written in
AWK. Might even work in gawk. Might even work, actually - I had no
time to write the code into files and give it a try.

Personally, I would rather use awk for this rather than multiple
command line utilities. Might be a bit nicer to modern system with
process accounting enabled (I once wrote a shell script processing
mailbox files, plenty of echos and greps, but since then have seen the
light and I repented). On the other hand, on multiprocessor computer,
each part of pipe runs in parallel, but I guess this had been said
already.

Also, found this in my notes - if you, or anybody from a future would
like a quick glimpse on "what awk":

 :: Drinking coffee with AWK

https://lobste.rs/s/hdljia/drinking_coffee_with_awk

https://opensource.com/article/19/2/drinking-coffee-awk

 :: Using AWK and R to parse 25tb

https://lobste.rs/s/kgah5l/using_awk_r_parse_25tb

https://livefreeordichotomize.com/2019/06/04/using_awk_and_r_to_parse_25tb/

-- 
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **


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