Awkward

A more ergonomic AWK

What is this?

This is meant as an attempt to make AWK more CLI friendly. For one, variables are now accessed with @ instead of $, so you're free to use any quotation type for the program without fear of forgetting to escape one of those little buggers.

It also supports most of AWK's core features, like regex matching lines, replacing and/or inserting fields, creating new records and more, along with new ones, like an "else" condition for lines that didn't match the previous rule, and a header flag that lets you index fields by their name.

Usage

Please note that this is still very much in experimental territory, so any of the following examples are subject to change (and maybe forgetfulness to update the docs). If any of the following examples dont work as expected, please let me know in an issue and I'll fix it right away.

Syntax

An Awkward (awd) program is structured in the following way: A "rule" is of the form condition -> action1, action2, action3;. If condition -> is omitted, the rule runs for every record. There are 3 special keywords that can be used for condition: start, end, and else.

• start makes the rule run before any record is processed (or with the header record, if the flag is set).
• end makes the rule run after the last record is processed.
• else makes the rule run only on records which failed to meet the condition specified immediately before it.

An action can be any valid expression, which are:

• Variable assignment (varname = expr).
• *Read a variable (varname).
• Field assignment (@1 = expr).
• *Read a field (@1).
• *Read a numeric field (n@1).
• *Read a boolean field (b@1).
• Drop statement (drop @1, @2).
• Keep statement (keep @1, @2).
• *A string literal ("a string").
• *A number literal (0.5).
• *A boolean literal (true).
• A function call (print("something", @1)).
• *Any arithmetic expression involving addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and modulo.
• *Simple concatenate ("hello" . "," . "world!").
• *Field-separator-included concatenate ("hello" .. "world").
• *Any equality or inequality expression (var < 3).
• *Any boolean algebra expression involving and, or, and not (var1 and b@3).
• *Regex match (/^\d+$/).

expressions marked with * are no-ops when used as actions.