# bash function and awk

2018年5月31日

I’ll come across many hg branch-switching or log searching tasks during my work. Using bash functions and awk greatly reduce the time I spend on dealing with these tasks. So let’s see what these functions can do to help me improve my productivity.

#### bash functions

Bash functions are scripts like `alias`, but can do much a lot than aliasThe first kind of usages of function is to run several scripts continuously, the same as `&&` I guess:

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    function run {
        source ~/Develop/django/bin/activate
        ./manage.py runserver
    }

I activate django virtural enviroment first and then run django serve.

Functions, like in any other languages, can take parameters and returns a result. So I can use this ability to do a liitle more complex work:

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    function ba { hgba | grep "$1" }
    # hgba is an alias for hg branches

I can just type `ba release` then get current release branch info.

Append:

I made some updates to the `ba` function and make it auto copying the branch result to my clipboard:

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    function ba { var="$(hgba | grep $1)" && echo $var | awk -F ':' END{print} | awk -F ':' '{print $NF}' | tr -d '\n' | pbcopy && echo $var }

#### awk

`awk` is a command I just know recently. I need to process a bunch of logs and analyze them. What I used to do is download the logs, grep things I want into a txt file and then process the txt file with python.