Lan will be giving a preview of her SCaLE 16x talk on AWK. Any feedback will be extremely helpful. We'll also be talking about SCaLE, volunteering for SCaLE, and plans for our booth at SCaLE.

Dinner begins around 7pm and the presentation will start after most people have received their food or 8pm, whichever comes first. Buying dinner is optional.

Practical AWK - AWKwardly Dealing with Data

AWK is a text processing programming language developed at Bell Labs in the 1970s. It was originally used for data extraction and reporting. It inspired the creation of Perl and can, for the most part, be replaced by Python. It is still incredibly useful on the Linux command-line, both for one-liners or for short, powerful scripts.

Most people have used AWK in one way or another, but they use it without understanding the language. AWK syntax can seem strange. But once you understand that it is a data-driven pattern action language where the data is automatically parsed into predefined variables, it becomes a powerful and intuitive tool.

This talk seeks to take the mystery out of AWK by giving a quick introduction to the language and its features. There will be examples where it provides functionality that a dedicated utility like grep or cut or head might not. There will also be more complex examples where a few lines of AWK result in useful summarization of large amounts of raw data.

AWK is a great Swiss Army knife if you spend a lot of time on the command- line.

Lan Dang Bio

Lan Dang is an Operations Engineer with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, specializing in science data systems operations and large scale data processing. She spends most of her time on the command line of various remote Linux systems. Her favorite tools are screen, awk, vim, and git. In her spare time, she is active in the San Gabriel Valley tech community as a leader of the SGVLUG and its sister group, the SGVHAK hardware hacking group.

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