frawk

frawk is a small programming language for writing short programs processing textual data. To a first approximation, it is an implementation of the AWK language; many common Awk programs produce equivalent output when passed to frawk. You might be interested in frawk if you want your scripts to handle escaped CSV/TSV like standard Awk fields, or if you want your scripts to execute faster.

The info subdirectory has more in-depth information on frawk:

• Overview: what frawk is all about, how it differs from Awk.
• Types: A quick gloss on frawk's approach to types and type inference.
• Parallelism: An overview of frawk's parallelism support.
• Benchmarks: A sense of the relative performance of frawk and other tools when processing large CSV or TSV files.
• Builtin Functions Reference: A list of builtin functions implemented by frawk, including some that are new when compared with Awk.

frawk is dual-licensed under MIT or Apache 2.0.

Installation

In addition to installing Rust, you will need an installation of LLVM 10.0 on your machine:

• See this site for installation instructions on some debian-based Linux distros.
• On Arch pacman -Sy llvm llvm-libs and a C compiler (e.g. clang) are sufficient as of September 2020.
• brew install llvm@10 or similar seem to work on Mac OS.

Depending on where your package manager puts these libraries, you may need to point LLVM_SYS_100_PREFIX at the llvm library installation (e.g. /usr/lib/llvm-10). While the LLVM backend is recommended, it is possible to build frawk only with support for its bytecode interpreter: to do so, build without the llvm_backend feature.

frawk currently requires a nightly compiler. Using rustup default nightly, or some other method to run a nightly compiler release is currently required to build frawk.

With those prerequesites, cloning this repository and a cargo build --release or cargo [+nightly] install --path <frawk repo path> will produce a binary that you can add to your PATH if you so choose:

$ cd <frawk repo path>
# With LLVM
$ cargo +nightly install --path .
# Without LLVM, but with other recommended defaults
$ cargo +nightly install --path . --no-default-features --features use_jemalloc,allow_avx2 

frawk is now on crates.io, so running cargo install frawk with the desired features should also work.

While there are no deliberate unix-isms in frawk, I have not tested it on Windows.

Bugs and Feature Requests

frawk has bugs, and many rough edges. If you notice a bug in frawk, filing an issue with an explanation of how to reproduce the error would be very helpful. There are no guarantees on response time or latency for a fix. No one works on frawk full-time. The same policy holds for feature requests.