Oid's Graffel

I generally like Debian, as documented by the fact that it's my Linux distribution of choice for pdes-net.org, for the two compute server at the office, for the Mini (which is currently out of order due to a defunct SSD), and for the virtual machine that I've reserved for online banking (biig mistake...see below). Since the stable version of Debian delivers only outdated software, I'm using 'testing' as the base, and if needed, I also install packages from 'sid'.

On my main systems, however, I don't use Debian, but Archlinux. I have several good reasons for this decision. One of them is that packages that belong in a museum are not reserved to Debian Stable, but are also regularly found in Testing or Sid.

One example is 'look', which I've recently reported to be a fast way for finding an entry in a huge file. The version of look in Debian, however, contains a bug that has been fixed ten years ago. Except, of course, in Debian (and all derivatives).

But what are 10 years if you can have 20? In 2010, c't presented a Perl script for downloading and processing the transactions from an account at Deutsche Bank. The script served me well for several years, but it broke a number of times due to changes of the web interface and Perl itself. I was able to fix the script the first four times, but the last time, about five years ago, I had to ask haui for help. And a few weeks ago, it simply broke completely, and I decided to let it go and extend my old bash script to process the csv files downloaded from Deutsche Bank.

Part of one of the new scripts is the following oneliner:

tail -n +4 $current_rates | iconv -f ISO8859-1 -t utf8 | awk '{split($0,a,";"); print a[14]}' | sed 's/,/./g' | bc -l | xargs printf %.2f"\n" | tr '\n' ' ' | awk '{print strftime("%Y-%m-%d")"\t"$7"\t"$6"\t"$1"\t"$5"\t"$4" \t"$2" \t"$3}'> $cleaned_rates

Worked perfectly on my notebook running Archlinux, but in the virtual machine reserved for online banking, I got the following error message:

mawk: line 2: function strftime never defined

Hmmm...

$ awk -W version
mawk 1.3.3 Nov 1996, Copyright (C) Michael D. Brennan

Are you kidding me? That's rather extreme even for Debian standards. Particularly when considering that version 1.3.4 was published in 2009, and strftime was added to it in 2012. But surely, sid has a more recent version...NOT 😒

Even CentOS 6 came with mawk 1.3.4. Shame on you, Debilian!

Well, the only choice was to install gawk, and in this particular case, the performance hit doesn't matter at all. But why isn't that the default, if the Debilians have chosen to neglect mawk? And why do they do that anyway?

Well, whatever. The scripts are working now. 😉