choose

Choose

This is choose, a human-friendly and fast alternative to cut and (sometimes) awk

Features

• terse field selection syntax similar to Python's list slices
• negative indexing from end of line
• optional start/end index
• zero-indexed
• reverse ranges
• slightly faster than cut for sufficiently long inputs, much faster than awk
• regular expression field separators using Rust's regex syntax

Rationale

The AWK programming language is designed for text processing and is extremely capable in this endeavor. However, the awk command is not ideal for rapid shell use, with its requisite quoting of a line wrapped in curly braces, even for the simplest of programs:

awk '{print $1}'

Likewise, cut is far from ideal for rapid shell use, because of its confusing syntax. Field separators and ranges are just plain difficult to get right on the first try.

It is for these reasons that I present to you choose. It is not meant to be a drop-in or complete replacement for either of the aforementioned tools, but rather a simple and intuitive tool to reach for when the basics of awk or cut will do, but the overhead of getting them to behave should not be necessary.

Contributing

Please see our guidelines in contributing.md.

Usage

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Examples

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Compilation and Installation

Installing From Source

In order to build choose you will need the rust toolchain installed. You can find instructions here.

Then, to install:

git clone https://github.com/theryangeary/choose.git
cd choose
cargo build --release
install target/release/choose <DESTDIR>

Just make sure DESTDIR is in your path.

Installing From Package Managers

Cargo:

cargo install choose

Arch Linux:

yay -S choose-rust-git

Fedora/CentOS COPR:

dnf copr enable atim/choose
dnf install choose

Homebrew:

brew install choose-rust

MacPorts:

sudo port install choose

Benchmarking

See benchmarking