• tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      15·
      18 hours ago

      To be fair, a lot of the programs don’t use a single character, have multiple spaces between fields, and cut doesn’t collapse whitespace characters, so you probably want something more like tr -s " "|cut -d" " -f3 if you want behavior like awk’s field-splitting.

      $ iostat |grep ^nvme0n1
nvme0n1          29.03       131.52       535.59       730.72    2760247   11240665   15336056
$ iostat |grep ^nvme0n1|awk '{print $3}'
131.38
$ iostat |grep ^nvme0n1|tr -s " "|cut -d" " -f3
131.14
$
      • ThunderLegend@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        10 hours ago

        This is awesome! Looks like an LPI1 textbook. Never got the certification but I’ve seen a couple books about it and remember seeing examples like this one.

      • TechLich@lemmy.world
        91·
        16 hours ago

        I never understood why so many bash scripts pipe grep to awk when regex is one of its main strengths.

        Like… Why

        grep ^nvme0n1 | awk '{print $3}'

        over just

        awk '/^nvme0n1/ {print $3}'

        • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
          10·
          10 hours ago

          Because by the time I use awk again, I’ve completely forgotten that it supports this stuff, and the discoverability is horrendous.

          Though I’d happily fix it if ShellCheck warned against this…