jt - Just Text

sed/awk/grep are pretty awesome tools but sometimes I wish they were slighly different. It's odd little things, like using substrings to remove a file extension:

ls | awk '{print substr($2, 0, length($2)-4)}'

I wish it was as easy as Python:

ls | jt '%2[:-4]'

or maybe even easier:

ls | jt '%2[:-"."]'

I wish often wish for just a little more date power. What if dates and times were a first class type:

ps -ef | jt '%5 < 2018-01-18T06:00'
ps -ef | jt '%5 > now - 5M'

Isolating a single column of data is one of the most frequent things I do with awk:

ps -ef | awk '{print $2}'

Wouldn't it be nice if it was just a little easier:

ps -ef | jt '%2'

Speaking of dates, haven't you always wanted to be able to use date not just for producing, but also for reformatting?

ps -ef | jt 'format(%5, "%Y-%M-%DT")'

This is an experiment to see what that could look like. It is very nacent. See examples of what should work at the moment in the Cookbook doc and examples of what I'd like to work in the Roadmap.

Table of Contents

• Roadmap
• Cookbook
• Development
  • Preparation
  • Development Cycle

Development

Preparation

A couple of tools are required:

• make build tool
• Pigeon parser generator

Development Cycle

To build the executable, just:

make

To run the full suite of automated tests:

make tests