fawk

Feb 8, 2009

There are a lot of old-school Unix commands that can be strung together to form miniatures programs a solution where one doesn’t already exist. Often times, they’re great for nothing more than trimming the output from command line programs to make ocular searching easier. awk is one of these great little text processing utilities, though I usually find myself using it in only it’s simplest fashion: to print a specific record from a line of input. 

Caligula:~$ df -h|awk '{print $2}'
698Gi
298Gi
190Gi
That awk command, '{print $2}', is more than a bit cumbersome to type, so I keyed up a quick function in my .bashrc to make performing this quick operation easier: 
Caligula:~$ df -h|fawk 2
698Gi
298Gi
190Gi
And the function: 
function fawk {
    first="awk '{print "
    last="}'"
    cmd="${first}$${1}${last}"
    eval $cmd
}