It's easy in awk to get fields counting from the start of a line;the first field is $1 , the second field is $2 , and so on. Butperiodically I'm not interested in fields at the start of the line, I'minterested in a field at the end of the line; it's much easier to seethat it's the third-last field than to carefully count how many fieldsit is from the start.

(And sometimes you have a

One of the important skills for Unix programming is the ability to parsemanpages carefully. This is not as easy as it looks, because manpagesare traditionally written in a style where everything is important andyou have to think carefully about the implications of the exact wordingused.

(This can be useful for other things than Unix manpages, since a lot ofspecifications are written in the same style.)

For example, today I was emailed a comment on my Pythonsocket module irritation entry pointing out the existence of the .

If you can answer this, you are not paying attention is a nice illustration and discussion of the importance of thinkingabout what you're writing in prompts and questions in software.Also interesting is a followup entry on whyeveryone is so against using 'yes' and 'no' for answers in dialog boxes.

(From Daring Fireball .)