GDGábor Dombayinawklab.com·Apr 9 · 12 min readUnix Pipes Under Load: Streaming, Barriers, Backpressure, and Bottlenecks 1. The Unix pipeline Every Unix user knows the pipe operator. Typing ls | wc -l, and two independent programs exchange data as if they were designed together. That simplicity reflects a deliberate des00
GDGábor Dombayinawklab.com·Mar 14 · 23 min readWhen RAM Matters: Memory Efficiency of AWK VariantsThe AWK scripting language emerged from Bell Labs in 1977, named for its creators Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan. AWK is still widely used today, as a core tool it is available on a36PDF
GDGábor Dombayinawklab.com·Mar 5 · 6 min readFreeBSD and dwl on a 2010 ThinkPad FreeBSD is a Unix operating system with a long history of stability, clean design, and excellent documentation. Older hardware tends to run it particularly well: mature driver support and a lean base 00
GDGábor Dombayinawklab.com·Feb 10 · 7 min readThe BEHILOS BenchmarkIn his book Unix: A History and a Memoir, Brian Kernighan recounts his favorite grep story from the early days of Unix. Someone at Bell Labs asked whether it was possible to find English words composed only of the letters formed by an upside-down cal...00
GDGábor Dombayinawklab.com·Feb 1 · 7 min readAWK: the Zero-Setup Pre-ProcessorModern data pipelines most often fail at their beginning, not their end. A malformed record, an unexpected delimiter, or an encoding anomaly can cause otherwise robust processing engines to abort after consuming significant computational resources. T...00
