(this is just a re-worked Gopher post)
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:
A nice perk to using AWK/GAWK over Python is its quite a bit faster; here
is a comparison listing 200 "gab" channel posts:
- think of a better name..
- rewrite and make better use of dynamic libraries
- roll all the bits into one giant gawk mess..