Life & fun · November 18, 2025
Strawk – I implemented Rob Pike's forgotten Awk
Rob Pike wrote a paper, Structural Regular Expressions (https://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/structural_regexps/se.pdf), that criticized the Unix toolset for being excessively line oriented. Tools like awk and grep assume a regular record structure usually denoted by newlines. Unix pipes just stream the file from one command to another, and imposing the newline structure limits the power of the Unix shell. In the paper, Mr. Pike proposed an awk of the future that used structural regular expressions to parse input instead of line by line processing. As far as I know, it…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
Rob Pike wrote a paper, Structural Regular Expressions (https://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/structural_regexps/se.pdf), that criticized the Unix toolset for being excessively line oriented. Tools like awk and grep assume a regular record structure usually denoted by newlines. Unix pipes just stream the file from one command to another, and imposing the newline structure limits the power of the Unix shell. In the paper, Mr. Pike proposed an awk of the future that used structural regular expressions to parse input instead of line by line processing. As far as I know, it was never implemented. So I implemented it. I attempted to imitate AWK and it's standard library as much as possible, but some things are different because I used Golang under the hood. Live Demo: https://ahalbert.github.io/strawk/demo/strawk.html Github: https://github.com/ahalbert/strawk
Does the same job
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My book titled "Python re(gex)?" is free to download through this weekend [1][2] The book covers both 're' and 'regex' modules, has plenty of examples and chapters also have cheatsheets and exercises. Code snippets, exercises, sample chapters, etc are available on GitHub repo [3] I used pandoc+xelatex [4] to generate the pdf. [1] https://gumroad.com/l/py_regex [2] https://leanpub.com/py_regex [3] https://github.com/learnbyexample/py_regular_expressions [4]…
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