On Mon, Jul 8, 2013 at 11:55 AM, Guido Van Hoecke <guivho@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Correct me if I am wrong, but I'm afraid that pure AWK does not provide
> date computation support. That's why I did not implement this.
> So I would definitely vote to extend the repeater syntax with a count.


Before defending my precious AWK, I'll say that I think that repeating
timestamps are a good idea and I'm not trying to talk anyone out of it.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awk: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awk>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awk>>> Although AWK and sed were designed to
support one-liner programs, even the early:
>> Bell Labs users of AWK often wrote well-structured large AWK programs,
and despite
>> its limited intended area of use, AWK is ____Turing-complete____

I wouldn't recommend starting out to write a significant app in AWK, but
adding a feature to an existing script doesn't seem unreasonable. The time
functions are documented at
http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html#Time-Functions. The input
may need a bit of string preprocessing before being passed to the time
functions and, as we all know, AWK does a fine job of string manipulation.

While I don't have time to bang on a huge script, if someone gives me the
input and output for the time conversion, I should be able to whip that up
pretty quickly.

Neil

PS: You crazy kids and your lack of respect for antiquated UNIX utilities
;-)

In the interest of full disclosure, the quote above from the WIkipedia is
immediately followed by:
>> The power, terseness, and limits of early AWK programs inspired Larry
Wall to write Perl

So your lack of AWK knowledge seems reasonable as there are many better
utilities.