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As a big fan of awk to do quick investigation i was a bit lost when we
switched to json. We have a json record per line, millions of lines a day - a
proper challange for a unix tool like awk if only awk could use the names
instead of the field positions.
First idea was to use the names instead of number. We have records like:
`{"abc":"3","xyz":"foo"}`
and the code would then look like:
`{print abc, xyz}`
but to stick with the awk pattern i just put the values (3, foo in our example) in their numbered slots (1, 2) as always but create variables (abc, xyz) with the index values (1, 2). so now you can write:
`{print $abc, $xyz}`
which looks similar nice and is just a minor hack (less than 50 lines code). the whole thing has it's drawbacks (the json overwrites vars in the code) and is limited to the pattern 'a json per line' but this is acceptable for my usecase (we write exactly that kind of file, i control the variable names in json and awk).
The feature is off by default and must be enabled by the commandline option
-j.