NAME

jawk -- like awk, but post-modern and perly. AKA, Josh's Awk.

SYNOPSIS

jawk [-x] [-e 'code'] [-d delim] fieldspec [fieldspec...] [-- (FILES..)]:

If you haven't seen awk, then jawk can be described as a flexible tool for extracting columns of data from text files.

If you've seen 'awk', then we can describe jawk as a replacement for statements like

  awk '{print $N}' 

which supports ranges, indexing columns by negative numbers, a perl mode, and more.

DESCRIPTION

jawk 1 is somewhat like awk '{print $1}'. Let's start with a fairly complex example. Suppose you have a file called 'users.txt' with lines of data in this format:

   Bob Elmer, 2716 Fremont Blvd, New York, NY, 12344, ID:91818, CanastaRating:3.1415
   Elmer Fudd, 1 Bunny Hill Drive, Tarrytown, NY, 87654, ID:1, CanastaRating:123456789

This statement would pull out the 1st, and 3rd through last columns, using ', ' as an input delimiter (we've put two spaces between options, for clarity):

  jawk  -d', '  1  3..-1  --  users.txt 

Note the use of negative indexes, the non-default element delimiter via -d, and the -- anti-option (which indicates that following arguments should be considered files to read).

jawk also allows ranges using the .. sequence. For example, a field specification can look like A, A..B, A.., or ..B, where (A and B can be negative or positive integers.

Negative values for A and B count backwards, so -1 is the last field.

Use -- or - FILENAME.txt to read from files. '--' is needed to treat FILENAME.txt as file and not fieldspec. See examples below.

Where you might previously use a command like

  grep pattern file.txt | awk '{print $2}'

to pull out the 2nd column from a file, you can now do:

  grep pattern file.txt | jawk 2

jawk offers many other improvements. Here are examples:

select out the 1st, 3rd, and 4th columns from file

  cat file | jawk 1 3 4

select all columns except the 1st, and 9th through remaining. Uses the -x option for an 'except' meaning.

   cat file | jawk -x 1 9..-1
      

select out the first through third, and the second to last, and last cols from a file.

  cat file | jawk 1..3 -2 -1

Same as above, but using : as an input delimiter instead of whitespace. Note use of -- to start list of files to read from @ARGV, so we can pass file to jawk directly instead of through cat.

  jawk -d: 1..3 -2 -1 -- file 

There is also a -exe='perlcode' mode where you access the args via @F, and not via named positional args. Like so:

  cat file | jawk -e 'print "@F\n";'

OPTIONS

Here's an explation of all the command-line options:

NON-ZERO INTEGER

A field specification option indicating that this particular column should (or should not, depending on -x, be output).

Negative indexes count from the right, like in perl, so the right-most column is number -1.

RANGE OF NON-ZERO INTEGERS

Integer ranges are specified with .., and given that A and B are non-zero integers, can look like

 A..B
 A..
 ..B

If you specify ranges in reverse order from their source, like cat file | jawk -1..1 or cat file | jawk 8-2 you'll get the fields in reverse order, like you asked.

-d delimiter (or -d=delimiter)

Specify an alternate delimiter in place of '\s+'. If not ' ', the delimiter is processed through perl's quotemeta() function and used as a regular expression to match between input fields.

-j joiner (or -j=joiner)

Specify an alternate join character sequence in place of 'space'.

-x

Exclude the chosen columns, negating their meaning. Does not interoperate with -e 'perlcode' option.

-e='perlcode' or -e 'perlcode'

Use perl code passed to process parsed items. Fields come in through the @F array, and are 0-indexed (like in perl) instead of 1-indexed (like in jawk and cut). A simple example, which shows the first and second columns of input, is

   cat file.txt | jawk -e 'print "$F[0] $F[1]\n"'

-w

Run perl code used with -e option with warnings on. (Strictness is always enabled but can be disabled by putting 'no strict' in your script).

-v

Show version number of jawk and exit.

--

Ends argument parsing. Used to pass filenames to read from stdin. See examples above.

BUGS

None known

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (c) 2011-2012 Josh Rabinowitz, All Rights Reserved.

AUTHORS

Josh Rabinowitz

cpanm App::Jawk

perl -MCPAN -e shell
install App::Jawk