Invitation To Tawking AWK With Kent Archie


Details
This is an online Zoom meeting which is free and open to the public.
Tuesday, August 25th, 2020 – 6:30pm - 8:30pm central time
The Zoom session will open around 6:15pm with the meeting starting at 6:30pm (with a short review of Group business before the speaker starts) and will end at 8:30 pm , and a virtual “Meeting after the Meeting” (afterwards).
The Fountaindale Library is closed for Meetings for now.
This meeting will be run virtually on-line using a UniForum Chicago Zoom account.
RSVP Yes here on Meetup to receive an email an hour ahead of time with URL link to the Zoom meeting.
Be sure to have a check mark in "Email me when someone sends me a message" on your Meetup account at this location https://www.meetup.com/account/comm/ in order to receive email notification of the Zoom URL for connecting to the meeting.
The event posted on UniForum Chicago's website: http://uniforumchicago.org/meetings/Tawking_AWK.html
Abstract
AWK is designed for processing and filtering text data using patterns. It's especially suited to managing log files but can be used for most anything. I think of it as a C interpreter in the command line. Add in the associative arrays (maps in C# or Java, dicts in Python) and you have a pretty powerful tool.
But why use awk when you have Perl, Python and bash? If you already know one or more of these, they will let you do everything awk does. But I think the syntax of awk is simpler than Perl and bash and more expressive than bash alone. I think Perl and Python are overkill for many applications.
Here I will go over the basic syntax of the language and how associative arrays work. Then we'll go over examples and combine AWK with some other tools to manipulate and interpret data. A quick example. A friend sends you a file of x,y values but made a mistake and reversed the columns. This fixes that:
gawk -F "," '{print $2 "," $1 }' < plotdata.txt
Kent Archie Bio
Kent Archie is a retired software developer. Over the years he has programmed on everything from Fortran using punched cards on a Univac 1100 to web applications using node.js and Mongodb. He has taught at several local colleges including DePaul and North Central. He is lately having fun building phone apps and working on a backlog of unread books. This will be Kent's 5th presentation before UniForum Chicago.
Getting to the meeting:
This August 2020 General meeting of UniForum Chicago (time as described with the meeting's title above) will NOT be at a physical location, but will be a virtual on-line meeting using a planned Zoom meeting for which the Zoom URL for connecting to the meeting will be emailed to those that RSVP'd Yes on Meetup.com for this meeting at least one hour before the start of the meeting (That means RSVPing Yes by 5pm-ish for the meeting to officially start at 6:30pm).
Note:
Be sure to have a check mark in "Email me when someone sends me a message" on your Meetup account at this location https://www.meetup.com/account/comm/ in order to receive email notification of the Zoom URL for connecting to the meeting.

Invitation To Tawking AWK With Kent Archie