Franco Pasut Blog

The article traces the fifty-year history of AWK, the historic text-processing tool created at Bell Labs and pre-installed on Unix-like systems. It illustrates its essential syntax based on the condition/action structure, as well as its column-based operation for extracting data, applying filters, and performing quick calculations. I highlight AWK's seamless integration with the Unix philosophy thanks to the use of command-line pipes. Finally, the comparison with Python demonstrates how AWK remains unbeatable today for its speed and brevity when performing quick analysis on log or text files.

Table of Contents 1. Does it still make sense to perform operations via the command line? 2. How do you open a command terminal? 3. The “cd” command. 4. The “ls” and “dir” commands. 5. The “cp” command. 6. The “rm” command. 7. In conclusion. 1. Does it still make sense to perform operations via the command line? Talking about the command line in today's operating systems might seem a bit vintage, as if the topic were a historical remnant of the first personal computers of the 1980s. In reality, even today, the command line is an extraordinarily efficient resource, despite the most modern graphical interfaces. MS-DOS was my first operating system back when “windows” had not yet been invented. To write this article, I recovered from my paper library an old book published in 1989 dedicated to MS-DOS, in which I found my underlinings from that time. Graphical systems have made everything easier but not faster . The advantage of text commands over thei...

ABSTRACT Article on how to copy a list of files in a folder and paste the list into an open document. The operation is performed only with resources internal to the tested operating systems, which are MS Windows, GNU/Linux (Arch, Fedora and Ubuntu) and macOS, although in the last one, only in command-line mode. 1. Topic of this article. 2. Command line solution in MS Windows. 3. Command-line solution in GNU/Linux and macOS. 4. Graphical solution in Windows with File Explorer. 5. Graphical solution in Linux with File Manager. 1. Topic of this article. Have you ever had a folder on your computer full of files and need to insert the list of those files in a page you are editing? It happens to me often for file lists to be inserted at the end of court documents. In this article, I describe a couple of solutions that I have personally tried, in the MS Windows environment and in various UNIX -derived operating systems, i.e., some GNU/Linux distributions, particul...