Show HN: Strawk – I implemented Rob Pike's forgotten Awk https://ift.tt/JVAFlkW

Show HN: Strawk – I implemented Rob Pike's forgotten Awk Rob Pike wrote a paper, Structural Regular Expressions ( https://ift.tt/hn7NXTJ ), that criticized the Unix toolset for being excessively line oriented. Tools like awk and grep assume a regular record structure usually denoted by newlines. Unix pipes just stream the file from one command to another, and imposing the newline structure limits the power of the Unix shell. In the paper, Mr. Pike proposed an awk of the future that used structural regular expressions to parse input instead of line by line processing. As far as I know, it was never implemented. So I implemented it. I attempted to imitate AWK and it's standard library as much as possible, but some things are different because I used Golang under the hood. Live Demo: https://ahalbert.github.io/strawk/demo/strawk.html Github: https://ift.tt/LN8qivZ November 18, 2025 at 10:55AM