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Archive of posts filed under the faq category.

Detecting empty files in awk

It's not straightforward, but it can be done.

The mythical “idempotent” file editing

Stop asking for that.

“Range of fields” in awk

This is asked very often, and the solution isn't always obvious (if at all).

Pulling out strings

Some ways to "pull out" strings from files

Replace every Nth occurrence

Problem statement: replace every Nth occurrence of a pattern. For bonus points, provide context to the match. For this article, we're going to use this example (mostly nonsensical, but that illustrates the concept): 1foo1 bar foo 2foo3 abc def foo foo foo 1foo4 foo foo 3foo9 4foo7 zzz 7foo7 3foo3 And we want, among all […]