Gábor Dombay
1. The Unix pipeline Every Unix user knows the pipe operator. Typing ls | wc -l, and two independent programs exchange data as if they were designed together. That simplicity reflects a deliberate design philosophy that Doug McIlroy articulated at Bell Labs in the 1970s: write programs that do one...
Gábor Dombay
The AWK scripting language emerged from Bell Labs in 1977, named for its creators Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan. AWK is still widely used today, as a core tool it is available on any Unix or Unix-like system (Linux, BSDs, macOS etc.). It operates as a compact, domain-specific...
Gábor Dombay
Modern data pipelines most often fail at their beginning, not their end. A malformed record, an unexpected delimiter, or an encoding anomaly can cause otherwise robust processing engines to abort after consuming significant computational resources. These failures are not rare edge cases; they are...
Gábor Dombay
Syntax is based on The AWK Programming Language, 2nd Edition by Alfred V. Aho, Brian W. Kernighan, and Peter J. Weinberger. Pattern A pattern determines when an action is executed. When a pattern matches an input line, its associated action is executed. If no action is specified, the default is...
Gábor Dombay
Because small is beautiful. Because AWK gives unmatched bang for the buck. Because AWK is the antidote to AI slop. Because AWK is always there when you need it. Because AWK assumes your data fits in a pipe, not a cluster. Because AWK makes you think, not just prompt. Because AWK’s syntax...
Gábor Dombay
"I think in terms of programming languages you get the most bang for your buck by learning AWK", said Brian Kernighan, the K in AWK (Lex Fridman podcast #109). AWK was created in Bell Labs in 1977, and its name is derived from the surnames of its authors: Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian...
Daniel Perelman
The problem# The actual filename structure of my blog posts contains the publishing date while the actual publishing date used by Pelican is in the file in a line starting Date:. For example, this file is content/2025/1026-lint-blog-dates.md and contains the header line Date: 2025-10-26 02:00...
Amedee
Ever wondered what it’s like to unleash 10 000 tiny little data beasts on your hard drive? No? Well, buckle up anyway — because today, we’re diving into the curious world of random file generation, and then nerding out by calculating their size distribution. Spoiler alert: it’s less fun than it...
Daniel Perelman
The problem# I've been playing Codenames online a lot lately (using my fork of codenames.plus), and a friend suggested it might be fun to have themed word lists. Specifically, they suggested Star Trek as a theme as it's a fandom that's fairly widely known. They left it up to me to figure out what...