This is a little tip that was impossible for me to DuckDuckGo (that’s right, I use DuckDuckGo like a verb). Like everyone who lives the daily joy (and, frequently, deep frustration) of using the command line to accomplish day-to-day tasks I am a fairly deft manipulator of strings. Often, I turn to AWK to achieve powerful results quickly.

Using AWK like grep

There is usually no reason to use grep with AWK. AWK lets you use /[whatever]/ to search for lines containing [whatever]. You can also use /! [whatever]/ to search for the opposite of [whatever]. After you’ve found the line you want to act upon, you can manipulate it further using the powerful functionality of AWK.

Today, however, I wanted to use AWK to find the rotation of my current display using xrandr. The name of current display device was stored in the environment variable $DISPLAY_DEVICE (and in this instance was LVDS-1). I could not figure out, nor could I find the right words to search for, how to do this.

I tried:

xrandr -q | awk -v device="$DISPLAY_DEVICE" '/device/ {print}'

I tried

xrandr -q | awk '/'"$DISPLAY_DEVICE"'/ {print}'

Finally, I figured it out! This is something I thought I should document for others using the same search terms (and for myself in a month):

The Magic 

awk -v device="$DISPLAY_DEVICE" '$0 ~ device {print}'

To get the rotation of a device from xrandr if you know the device name it’s:

xrandr -q | awk -v device='LVDS-1' '$0 ~ device {gsub("([()]| primary)", ""); print $4}'

<3 AWK so darn much.