Using sed to make indexes for books (1997)

tomhow•16 minutes ago

Previously:

Using sed to make indexes for books (1997) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16080505 - Jan 2018 (17 comments)

janandonly•about 2 hours ago

Two thought:

1. I feel the use of AWK, SED, GREP and Bash (to name a few) is general waning. I rarely see it outside of HN posts. I wish I were better at using it. Sometimes for a special need I’ll ask a LLM to write me a script in bash just to keep this spirit alive.

2. On the other hand, I’ve written a book and added an index by using Microsoft Word, and it was basically pretty easy to add. I don’t know why I should want to go back to a world of intricate command line tools to do a job that should just be easy enough?

nyrikki•about 1 hour ago

When this post was written (1997 updated in 2001), awk wasn't very portable because you still had the awk,nawk,gawk flavors. With sed if you stuck with BRE and avoided ERE you were going to be more portable.

But this email is a there because it is a bit of a feat of strength, thus why it was sent to the seders list. I wouldn't have used sed for all of this at the time, and I am wondering what they were using for publishing in anyway. In 1997/2001 I would have just taken text inputs and used LaTeX, and even indexes with troff was easier.

QuarkXPress and Pagemaker were very popular at that time, with QuarkXPress having almost all the commercial market in the 90s, so they must have been using something very specific for this religious market.

But also note that VS Code/ides with Vim keybindings is extremely popular among modern software developers, so while they may not call sed directly they still use it with `:`

That is the same reason we used it in the 80-90's, you had sed, vi, ed, etc... that were at least usable without much pain across all the drift of the UNIX wars.

But I am really curious on why this email even existed at all, it doesn't make sense outside of someone playing with UNIX/Linux as a side quest, unless they were *troff/TeX based?

tyingq•about 1 hour ago

> awk wasn't very portable because you still had the awk,nawk,gawk flavors

Debian and Ubuntu both ship with mawk and Alpine has the busybox flavor of awk (nawk like). MacOS still ships with a default nawk. I don't know the scene has changed much, still many flavors out there.

BigTTYGothGF•about 1 hour ago

Perl was in 1997 and is today a better awk+sed.

skydhash•about 1 hour ago

> I feel the use of AWK, SED, GREP and Bash (to name a few) is general waning. I rarely see it outside of HN posts. I wish I were better at using

You can find plenty of examples with a quick github search[0]. The query in the url is

  path:bin dotfiles language:Shell

A shell script is my first option for any automation. sed is for quick transformations and awk is for more procedural ones.

[0] https://github.com/search?q=path%3Abin+dotfiles+language%3AS...

Using sed to make indexes for books (1997)

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