Today, I wanted to mess around with this thing called ‘mawk 3’. I’ve heard some good things about it and figured, why not give it a shot? So, I started by, well, getting it on my machine.
First, I needed to find out where to download this thing. After poking around the internet, I found what seemed like a good source. Grabbed the latest version, 1.3.4-20231107, just the standard x86_64 one. Figured that’s what most people use, right?
Once I downloaded it, I had this tarball file. I extracted it, and there it was, the ‘mawk’ executable along with some other files. Then I moved it into my /usr/local/bin directory. I don’t know why, but it feels like the proper place for these sorts of things. I also did this stuff with the man pages. Put those in the man1 folder or whatever. I just followed what people on forums seemed to be doing.
After that, I typed in mawk -W version in my terminal, just to make sure it was installed correctly. And boom, it showed the version number and stuff. I felt pretty good at this point, like I was actually getting somewhere.
Next up, I wanted to try it out, see what it could do. I had this text file, let’s call it . It was just a bunch of lines with some text and numbers. I found some simple commands online, like mawk ‘{print $1}’ *. I ran it, and it printed the first word of each line. Cool, I guess.
- Then I tried something a bit fancier, like mawk ‘$2 > 50 {print $1}’ *. This one was supposed to print the first word if the second one was bigger than 50. It worked! I was starting to get the hang of this.
- I played around with some more commands, things like adding up numbers, finding lines that matched certain patterns. It was kind of fun, to be honest. I could see how this could be useful for messing with text files.
Finally, I figured I should try some of the newer features, since I had that ‘mawk 3’ version. I found some examples online that used things like and . They didn’t work with the older version, but with this one, they did! I felt a little proud, like I was using the cutting edge or something.
So, that was my day with ‘mawk 3’. It was pretty interesting. I feel like I learned something new and could actually use this tool for some stuff. I mean, it’s not going to change my life or anything, but it’s neat, you know?
Final Thoughts
This whole ‘mawk 3’ thing turned out to be a nice little adventure. I started with knowing nothing, and now I can do some basic stuff with it. I think I’ll keep playing around with it. Who knows, maybe I’ll even use it for something practical someday. Overall, a good day of tinkering, I’d say.
