While trying to find the needle in a haystack, you find yourself recklessly grepping some log files. Suddenly, it occurs to you that there might be a pattern in the data, and awk
will be the fastest way to figure out if this pattern has any relevance or not. You want to change your grep
into an awk
oneliner.
This involves some mechanical work: Arrow up to get to the command line, move to the word grep
and change it, forward to the start of the regular expression and add '/
. Move to the end of the regular expression, and type: / {}'
. Not a big deal, but mechanical work, which does add up if you're doing this eight times a day.
For this slight inconvenience, the tool grep2awk
was written. It finds the first occurrence of the word grep
in the current command line, and tries to convert the options and the regular expression into a skeleton for an awk
-script. Just press a key you have chosen yourself, and you're already past the point of potential distraction which the mechanical work can entail.
After pressing a magical key combination, your editing buffer will be searched for grep
commands, and the buffer will have the grep
part replaced by an awk
command.
% grep 'there^here'<CTRL-X><CTRL-A>
% awk -- '/there\^here/ {print $0}'
It works with pipes, subshells, et cetera (thanks to split-shell-arguments
):
% ps aux | grep kswap | sort<CTRLX><CTRL-A>
% ps aux | awk -- '/kswap/ {print $0}' | sort
The meat of this thing is in the transformation of BREs to EREs (when egrep
or -E
is not called):
% grep '^a^b\(c(\|d)e\)' file<CTRL-X><CTRL-A>
% awk -- '/^a\^b(c\(|d\)e)/ {print $0}' file
Some options to grep will be translated to appropriate awk statements:
% grep -vi 'not here' file <CTRLX><CTRL-A>
% awk -- 'BEGIN{IGNORECASE=1}; !/not here/ {print $0}' file
If you are using some zsh configuration framework or plugin manager, jump ahead. If you are rolling your own zsh configuration, here is the deal. Clone the repository someplace:
cd someplace
git clone git@github.com:joepvd/grep2awk.git
Then, in ~/.zshrc
, append someplace
to $fpath
:
fpath+=(someplace)
Make sure grep2awk
gets autoload
-ed, making the script known as a line editor (zle
) script, and assigning a key binding to it:
autoload -Uz grep2awk
zle -N grep2awk
bindkey "^X^A" grep2awk
Now, pressing <CTRL-X>
-<CTRL-A>
will bring you goodies!
Clone this repository in the custom/plugins
directory of oh-my-zsh
. Then add grep2awk
to the list of plugins:
plugins+=(grep2awk)
If you don't like the default ^X^A
-keybinding, you can set the variable GREP2AWK_KEY
to your desired key combination.
Put antigen bundle joepvd/grep2awk
in your startup file, and you should be good. GREP2AWK_KEY
can be used to override the default key binding.
Clone the repository in the modules directory of zpresto
:
cd ${ZDOTDIR:-$HOME}/.zprezto/modules
git clone git@github.com:joepvd/grep2awk.git
Then, probably in ~/.zprestorc
, add grep2awk
to the list zstyle ':prezto:load' pmodule
. The keybinding defaults to ^X^A
, but can be set by setting the variable GREP2AWK_KEY
.
This zle function can be configured as follows:
zstyle ':grep2awk:' awk 'gawk --'
This sets the command that will be executed. The default is awk
, and if you desire to use another awk program, you can do so.
zstyle ':grep2awk:*:' debug /path/to/file
If debug
has a value, some information is dumped in the file specified. If it does not start with a /
, the working directory of the current zsh shell is used. Currently, only the context bre2ere
is supported.
-v
- inverse match
-w
- word match
-x
- line match
-l
- list matching files
-L
- list not matching files
-H
- include filename in result
-n
- include line number in result
-c
- count occurrences per file
-i
- case insensitive matching
-E
- Extended Regular Expressions
-F
- Fixed string matching
Patches and bug reports welcome! Main development takes place at https://github.com/joepvd/grep2awk/.
There is a testing library in the t
-directory, in which the testing framework from the ZSH-project has been adjusted to work with the currently installed shell. Please run and update the tests when playing with the code.
Please let me know if you like it, and what could be better to support your needs!