On Mon, Jul 8, 2013 at 11:55 AM, Guido Van Hoecke <gui...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Correct me if I am wrong, but I'm afraid that pure AWK does not provide > date computation support. That's why I did not implement this. > So I would definitely vote to extend the repeater syntax with a count. Before defending my precious AWK, I'll say that I think that repeating timestamps are a good idea and I'm not trying to talk anyone out of it. >From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awk: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awk> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awk>>> Although AWK and sed were designed to support one-liner programs, even the early: >> Bell Labs users of AWK often wrote well-structured large AWK programs, and despite >> its limited intended area of use, AWK is ____Turing-complete____ I wouldn't recommend starting out to write a significant app in AWK, but adding a feature to an existing script doesn't seem unreasonable. The time functions are documented at http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html#Time-Functions. The input may need a bit of string preprocessing before being passed to the time functions and, as we all know, AWK does a fine job of string manipulation. While I don't have time to bang on a huge script, if someone gives me the input and output for the time conversion, I should be able to whip that up pretty quickly. Neil PS: You crazy kids and your lack of respect for antiquated UNIX utilities ;-) In the interest of full disclosure, the quote above from the WIkipedia is immediately followed by: >> The power, terseness, and limits of early AWK programs inspired Larry Wall to write Perl So your lack of AWK knowledge seems reasonable as there are many better utilities.
