I'm building a tool called rcut that allows you to use cut like syntax with features like regexp based delimiters. The solution uses awk inside a bash script.

Latest feature creep is fixed string field splitting. I thought it would be a simple enough solution to add.

I was wrong.

This blog post covers Basic Regular Expressions (BRE) and Extended Regular Expressions (ERE) syntax supported by GNU grep, sed and awk. You'll also learn the differences between these tools — for example, awk doesn't support backreferences within regexp definition (i.e. the search portion).

TL;DR: Small victories are more precious when you have nothing. Instead of burning through my savings, I'm now adding to it. The relief is priceless.

Hello!

I just published my ebook titled "100 Page Python Intro". This book is a short, introductory guide for the Python programming language. This book is well suited:

• As a reference material for Python beginner workshops
• If you have prior experience with another programming language
• If you want a complement resource after reading a Python basics book, watching a video course, etc

This post shows how you can use ripgrep, perl and sd to perform multiline fixed string search and replace operations from the command line. Solution with GNU sed is also discussed, along with its limitations.