[ale] Get host's IP address as an unprivileged user?

The Don Lachlan ale-at-ale.org at unpopularminds.org
Wed Jun 8 12:28:05 EDT 2011


On 06/08/2011 10:11 AM, Geoffrey Myers wrote:
> Derek Atkins wrote:
>> I admit that 'awk' is just one of those tools I never completely groked.
>> I learned enough to use it to print out the Nth field, but that's really
>> all I know how to do with it, which is why I use the other tools.
> I once used awk to build a language pre-processor, so I have used it
> extensively.  Gotten a little rusty of late though, from disuse.

Absolutely. AWK is a Turing-complete programming language, not a shell 
command. I *could* write anything with it, though its specialization is 
far more narrow.

>> Besides, that's the whole point of Unix -- you have lots of small tools
>> that each do one thing well, and then you string them together to make
>> the functionality you want!
> True, but reducing the number of processes is always good.

And one also know how to do more than add 2 + 2. AWK and sed are very 
powerful and most people use them in place of cut and tr because they 
have no idea what's even possible with them.

On the other side, I often hear, "Well, I can just write it in Perl." 
Yes, Perl shares much of the same purpose/specialization but when 
someone learns AWK and sed, they find there are some things that are far 
simpler in those two than in Perl.

-L


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