alias glorp='ruby -ane '
$ [data is generated] | glorp ' ~ /Something/ and puts $F[2]'
$ echo -e '{"hello":"world"}\n{"hello":"cat"}' | glorp 'puts JSON.load($_)["hello"] ' -rjson
$ echo -e 'this\nis\na\nwhatever foo' | nip 'return /whatever/.test(line) && cols[1]' # fooI can think of two very strong reasons to prefer awk over perl:
* busybox implements awk, so its (usually) available even on embedded platforms
* awk syntax is way clearer than perl, anyone that has a few experience in C + shell can figure out what is being done with some googling
awk is also powerful enough to separate output to different files, accumulate inputs, etc. And if you need anything more complex, there are tons of other languages to choose from then (including perl).
https://code.activestate.com/recipes/437932-pyline-a-grep-li...
However, Ruby completely inherited this aspect of Perl and is another good candidate. It's just even old systems have a perl installed that will perform the awk like functionality.
https://code.google.com/archive/p/pyp/
"Pyp is a linux command line text manipulation tool similar to awk or sed, but which uses standard python string and list methods as well as custom functions evolved to generate fast results in an intense production environment."
Of course, you can do all of this in Python, just not as a one liner.
The alias below sets perl to loop over STDIN splitting each line on more than one whitespace character and populate an array F. The -nE will then Evaluate an expression from the command line looping over the input line-by-line.
So now we have the command `glorp` to play with which has more familiar syntax than awk and all of CPAN available to play with! We have access to any Perl module by putting -MModule::Name=function after the command, the following will parse a JSON record per line and glorp out what we wanted: Maybe you are used to using curl too. There is a nice web framework in Perl called Mojolicious (http://mojolicious.org) that provides a convenience module called 'ojo' for command line use. So grabbing the summary sentence from Wikipedia articles is as straight forward as below. Notice Mojolicious lets us use CSS selectors!