Linux.com: Turbocharged awk

“In a previous article, I covered the basics of awk and
presented a small application to reformat address book data. Now,
I’ll show you how to turbocharge awk. You can improve the
performance of your awk programs by uncovering bottlenecks in your
code with the help of a profiler, hunting for bugs with XREF, and
using Awka to increase speed.

“If your awk program isn’t running at an acceptable speed, the
first thing to do is look for a logic error. You may have created a
loop that is executing more often than it should or processing a
set of records more than once. The GNU version of awk includes a
profiler–usually found in /bin/pgawk–to help you find these kinds
of programming bugs…”

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