• Lauchmelder@feddit.org
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    15 hours ago

    Why spend 30 seconds manually editing some text when you can spend 30 minutes clobbering together a pipeline involving awk, sed and jq

      • Tangent5280@lemmy.world
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        4 hours ago

        The important part is to learn the limits of any tool. Nowadays I no longer use jq for any long or complicated tasking. Filter and view data? jq is fine. Anything more and I just cook up a python script.

          • Tangent5280@lemmy.world
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            3 hours ago

            How do you get complex data structures to work? I was alienated from scripting on zsh because I wanted something like a dict and realised I would have to write my own implementation. Is there a work around for that?

            • tal@lemmy.today
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              1 hour ago

              I mean, there’s a point in data structure complexity where it’s useful to use Python.

              But as to dicts, sure. You’re looking for zsh’s “associative array”. Bash has it too.

              zsh

              $ typeset -A mydict
              $ mydict[foo]=bar 
              $ echo $mydict[foo]
              bar
              $
              

              bash

              $ typeset -A mydict
              $ mydict[foo]=bar
              $ echo ${mydict[foo]}
              bar
              $
              
              • Tangent5280@lemmy.world
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                1 hour ago

                This will do nicely - I had several workflows where I’d hit an API and get a massive super nested JSON as output; I’d use jq to get the specific data from the whole thing and do a bunch of stuff on this filtered data. I pretty much resigned to using python because I’d have successively complicated requirements and looking up how to do each new thing was slowing me down massively.