Shantanu's Blog

Formats its input into lines that are at most 60 characters long

# fmt - format
# input: text
# output: text formatted into lines of <= 60 characters

awk '/./ { for (i = 1; i <= NF; i++) addword($i) }
/^$/ { printline(); print "" }
END { printline() }

function addword(w) {
    if (length(line) + length(w) > 60)
        printline()
        line = line " " w
    }
function printline() {
    if (length(line) > 0) {
        print substr(line, 2)
        line = ""
    }
}' long.txt  

Labels: awk

Cliche generator, which creates new cliches out of old ones. The input is a set of sentences like

# cat cliche.txt

A rolling stone:gathers no moss.
History:repeats itself.
He who lives by the sword:shall die by the sword.
A jack of all trades:is master of none.
Nature:abhors a vacuum.
Every man:has a price.
All's well that:ends well.

where a colon separates subject from predicate. Our cliche program combines a random subject with a random predicate; with luck it produces the occasional mildly amusing aphorism:

A rolling stone repeats itself.
History abhors a vacuum.
Nature repeats itself.
All's well that gathers no moss.
He who lives by the sword has a price.

# cliche - generate an endless stream of cliches
# input: lines of form subject:predicate
# output: lines of random subject and random predicate

Labels: awk

Isolate the words and aggregate the count for each word in an associative array. A word is a field without the punctuation marks like ? or ,

Labels: awk

Labels: awk

The following program arith presents a sequence of addition problems like

7 + 9 = ?

After each problem, the user types an answer. If the answer is right, the user is praised and presented with another problem. If the answer is wrong, the program asks for the answer again. If the user provides no answer at all, the right answer is printed before the next problem is presented. The program is invoked with one of two command lines:

awk -f arith
awk -f arith n

If there is an argument after ari th on the command line, the argument is used to limit the maximum size of the numbers in each problem. After this argument has been read, ARGV [ 1 ] is reset to "-" so the program will be able to read the answers from the standard input. If no argument is specified, the maximum size will be 10.

BEGIN {
    maxnum = ARGC > 1 ? ARGV[1] : 10
    ARGV[1] = "-"
    srand()
    do {
        n1 = randint(maxnum)
        n2 = randint(maxnum)
        printf("%g + %g = ? ", n1, n2)
        while ((input = getline) > 0)
            if ($0 == n1 + n2) {
                print "Right!"
                break
            } else if ($0 == "") {
                print n1 + n2
                break
            } else
                printf("wrong, try again: ")
    } while (input > 0)
}
function randint(n) {
return int(rand()*n)+1
 }

Labels: awk

Mail-merge using AWK

Labels: awk