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Thu May 25 09:05:14 PM UTC 2023

Hiya,
This is the very first "Zilog@rtc newZ" post. Sorta aiming for something
more than bullet points but not quite a full-on phlog for chronicling my
various RAWtext.club projects/activities.

 - - Addendum - - 

Oh right, the activities..  Well, I spent much of the past Winter immersed
in the AWK programming language, something I'd pretty much only utilized
as part of various "one-liners" in my shell sessions.  AWK is actually
a complete "little language" with capabilities that approach that of
Perl and Python with respect to system scripts. And anyone who spends
much time with AWK likely becomes interested in the various extensions
available via Gnu AWK, aka GAWK.

Anyways, here on RTC there are several community forums for members to
share thoughts, ideas, news.  Gab, written in Python, is one of the more
popular forum platforms.  Gab supports multiple topic channels, both
public and semi-private as well as some extras like checking for unread
messages.

To push myself with GAWK I've been working on rewriting each gab(1) option
as its own GAWK program.  Most are now done and currently bundled together
via a shell script located at ~zilog/public_bin/gawkr ; 'gawkr -h' gives
the basic usage which is nearly identical to gab(1).  I added a --status
option which provides a nice heads up if sourced from ~/.bash_profile:

$ ~zilog/public_bin/gawkr -s
Current channel: gab
No unread messages.
Currently blocked:

A nice perk to using AWK/GAWK over Python is its quite a bit faster; here
is a comparison listing 200 "gab" channel posts:

$ time gab -l 200 >/dev/null

real	0m0.277s
user	0m0.223s
sys 	0m0.037s

$ time gawkr -l 200 >/dev/null

real	0m0.084s
user	0m0.045s
sys 	0m0.022s