jingo811's awk problems, need help pls?

[jingo811]

I'm trying to learn awk and reading from this beginners guide.
http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-G...#sect_06_02_03
I understand what it is trying to do but I can't make it work in terminal. Got any tips for me?

ls -l | awk '/\<(a|x).*\.conf$/ { print $9 }'

[pmasiar]

I told you before that you should learn Python instead! Awk is even worse than Perl. Good luck!

[wdk]

Try it without using the -l switch

The reason it doesn't appear to work is that the expression is trying to find an "a" or an "x" at the beginning of the entire 8 column string returned by the -l switch, which of course will always begin with "-" (or "d" for directories)

Also, printing column $9 won't actually work (at least in ubuntu--my familiarity with other flavors is limited). try $8 instead:

ls -l | awk '/\.conf$/ { print $8 }'

again, remove the -l switch to chop off all the preceding columns and match at the beginning of the filename

Good luck!

[jingo811]

Tnx wdk that explained a lot. You don't happen to know how to use the "reg expression thingy" so that I only get *.conf files starting with letter A and U?
It doesn't work for me also what's the $ sign doing after conf like so conf$?

bill@gates:/etc$ ls | awk '/\.conf$/ { print $1 }'
adduser.conf
brltty.conf
ca-certificates.conf
debconf.conf
deluser.conf
fdmount.conf
hdparm.conf
host.conf
inetd.conf
kernel-img.conf
ld.so.conf
lftp.conf
libao.conf
logrotate.conf
ltrace.conf
mke2fs.conf
netscsid.conf
nsswitch.conf
pam.conf
pnm2ppa.conf
popularity-contest.conf
resolv.conf
scrollkeeper.conf
sysctl.conf
syslog.conf
ucf.conf
uniconf.conf
updatedb.conf
usplash.conf
vnc.conf
wodim.conf
wvdial.conf
bill@gates:/etc$ ls | awk '/\<(a|u)\.conf$/ { print $1 }'
bill@gates:/etc$ 

bill@gates:/etc$ ls | awk '/\<(a|u).*\.conf$/ { print $1 }'
bill@gates:/etc$

I told you before that you should learn Python instead! Awk is even worse than Perl. Good luck!

If I would program for fun or business then I'd choose Python in a heartbeat. But you know school is forcing us to learn Bash, awk, sed, etc. because we're supposed to become "great" Linux administrators when we have graduated

[pmasiar]

maybe you can for fun solve all problems in Python and show your teacher.

it is well known that many teachers (not all - not those reading this forum of course ), without the pressure from competitive marketplace, can teach same old stale crap for years. Ie in our community college there is "Intro to programming" - in COBOL

[jingo811]

hehe that's even older than relic

[wdk]

I'm glad you found my previous post helpful

The "\<" command is specific to gawk, which you are probably not running if you are using a default (or pretty close) installation of Ubuntu.

Try replacing "\<" with "^", which should work with all awk implementations.

^ - matches text at the beginning of the string
$ - matches at the end of the string

This site may be useful to you:
http://www.math.utah.edu/docs/info/gawk_5.html

(The site is gawk oriented, but should be useful anyway)

Good luck!

[jingo811]

Tnx wdk for the regex link gonna read it right away!

• Both Perl and awk share the reputation of being incomprehensible, even to the actual authors of the programs that use these languages. So document your code!

source: http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-G...ect_06_04.html

They should really tell ppl that more often

[ghostdog74]

Tnx wdk that explained a lot. You don't happen to know how to use the "reg expression thingy" so that I only get *.conf files starting with letter A and U?

you should also get to know about shell expansion. For your case ,

ls -l [AU]*.conf

[jingo811]

Tnx ghostdog that was even better and cleaner than the awk way of thinking.