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Jonathan Palardy
Personal blog · blog.jpalardy.comprogrammingsystems
Jonathan Palardy's personal blog at blog.jpalardy.com covers programming and systems. Since 2013, 18 different Hacker News readers have linked it 45 times, most often “Why Learn Awk? (2016)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-12-17, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Jonathan Palardy's posts to explain awk and command-line text processing, such as 'Why Learn Awk' and an alternative to sort | uniq -c. Commenters credit them with making awk click.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Jonathan Palardy's blog about technology
Most-linked posts?
- Why Learn Awk? (2016)3 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-08-01
- Solving Problems with MiniZinc3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-04-05
- Statistics: How Many Would You Check?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-04-09
- Skip grep, use awk2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-07-03
- Bash Aliases, Functions and Commands2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-08-10
- My Best Awk Tricks (2016)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-11-18
What Hacker News says?
Here's some articles * https://blog.jpalardy.com/posts/why-learn-awk/ (also discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22108680 ) * https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-...
Comment linking /posts/why-learn-awk/
on “Awk in 20 Minutes (2015)”Submitted Why Learn Awk? (2016) as a story · 420 points
HN discussionJonathan Palardy 'Why Learn AWK' [1]. I'd tried to learn awk a few times but just couldn't grok it. This essay gave me a lightbulb moment. Honourable mention to 'Automate the Boring Stuff with Python' [2], which does what not a lot of tutorials do - motivate programming for non-technical users. [1] https://blog.jpalardy.com/posts/why-learn-awk/ [2] https://automatetheboringstuff.com
Comment linking /posts/why-learn-awk/
on “Ask HN: Your favourite tutorial for total beginners?”Submitted Skip grep, use awk as a story · 332 points
HN discussionto count the unique lines from a file: cat animals.txt | awk '{ cnts[$0] += 1 } END { for (v in cnts) print cnts[v], v }' https://blog.jpalardy.com/posts/alternative-to-sort-uniq-c/
Comment linking /posts/alternative-to-sort-uniq-c/
on “Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?”Submitted How to Shuffle and Sample on the Command-Line as a story · 82 points
HN discussionReminds me of a similar article [1] Once you get a hang of how shell constructs like pipes, redirections, globs, variable/command substitutions, etc, the various cli text processing tools like grep, sed, awk, perl, sort, tr, pr, paste, etc are worth to learn at least the basics. They have been through years of use and heavily optimized for performance. Just today, a friend of mine called to ask how to improve a Pyth…
Comment linking /posts/why-learn-awk/
on “Learn Just a Little Awk (2010)”Submitted Solving Problems with MiniZinc as a story · 56 points
HN discussionCan't we do it in AWK https://blog.jpalardy.com/posts/alternative-to-sort-uniq-c/
Comment linking /posts/alternative-to-sort-uniq-c/
on “Sorting 1M 8-digit numbers in 1 MB of RAM (2012)”Submitted Statistics: How Many Would You Check? as a story · 7 points
HN discussionI always link to this blog post [0] by Jonathan Palardy. It was one of those eye opening articles for me that really helped me 'grok' it - and this is after having had a couple of stabs at learning it just from reading the text books on it. Awk for me is part of the layers of tools from grep/sed -> AWK -> perl one liner -> full on script. The further down the ladder you go, the more restricted you are, but this mean…
Comment linking /posts/why-learn-awk/
on “Awk: `Begin { ` Part 1”Submitted Wrapping Command-Line Tools as a story · 5 points
HN discussion> can fish shell show inline docs Yes, it can. It's not the full docs of course, but tab completion for flags often comes with a one liner about what it does from the docs [1]. [1]: https://blog.jpalardy.com/posts/fish-shell-is-awesome/
Comment linking /posts/fish-shell-is-awesome/
on “Why is the terminal input so weird?”Submitted Awk Tutorial as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSpreadsheets freeze to process more than 1 million records; AWK works like charm; https://blog.jpalardy.com/posts/alternative-to-sort-uniq-c/
Comment linking /posts/alternative-to-sort-uniq-c/
on “Benchmarking Spreadsheet Systems”Submitted How to cut a rectangle into 3 without a ruler as a story · 4 points
HN discussionMy rough workflow is: * Can I solve the problem using one-liners (grep, sed, awk, perl, sort, etc)? Or perhaps from within Vim? * Can I glue together one-liners with minimal control flow as a Bash script? * If not, go for Python --- Discussion for https://blog.jpalardy.com/posts/why-learn-awk/ mentioned at the end of the article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22108680 (420 points | Jan 21, 2020 | 235 comments)
Comment linking /posts/why-learn-awk/
on “Fascination of Awk”Submitted QR Codes on the Command-Line as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Problem Solving with MiniZinc as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Problem Solving with MiniZinc as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted My Best Awk Tricks as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why Learn Awk? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted My Best Awk Tricks (2016) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Dealing with Non-ASCII Characters as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Git: How to Find Modified Files on a Branch as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted My best AWK tricks as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted JavaScript tooling: madge as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted ISO 8601 and Date Arithmetic on the Command-Line as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Bash Aliases, Functions and Commands as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Handling Broken JSON with jq as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
