@zimpenfish
I can recommend awk (or gawk = GNU awk) for such a task.

#awk

Curious which words (>3 letters) in your system dictionary have all the letters in alphabetical order? Sate your curiosity with a little #awk:

$ awk 'length>3 && /^a*b*c*d*e*f*g*h*i*j*k*l*m*n*o*p*q*r*s*t*u*v*w*x*y*z*$/' /usr/share/dict/words

Optionally sort they by length:

$ awk 'length>3 && /^a*b*c*d*e*f*g*h*i*j*k*l*m*n*o*p*q*r*s*t*u*v*w*x*y*z*$/{print length, $0}' /usr/share/dict/words | sort -n

give me "billowy" and "beefily" as words of interest. If you don't like duplicates, use "?" instead of "*"

$ awk 'length>3 && /^a?b?c?d?e?f?g?h?i?j?k?l?m?n?o?p?q?r?s?t?u?v?w?x?y?z?$/{print length, $0}' /usr/share/dict/words | sort -n

which gives "almost", "biopsy", and "chintz" as nice long runs.

ํ„ฐ๋ฏธ๋„ ์‹คํ–‰์‹œ ์ฒซ ํ™”๋ฉด์„ ์ปค์Šคํ…€ํ•ด๋ณด์ž

https://hackers.pub/@widehyo/2026/%ED%84%B0%EB%AF%B8%EB%84%90-%EC%8B%A4%ED%96%89%EC%8B%9C-%EC%B2%AB-%ED%99%94%EB%A9%B4%EC%9D%84-%EC%BB%A4%EC%8A%A4%ED%85%80%ED%95%B4%EB%B3%B4%EC%9E%90

ํ„ฐ๋ฏธ๋„ ์‹คํ–‰์‹œ ์ฒซ ํ™”๋ฉด์„ ์ปค์Šคํ…€ํ•ด๋ณด์ž

WSL2 ํ™˜๊ฒฝ์—์„œ C ๋“œ๋ผ์ด๋ธŒ์™€ ๊ฐ™์€ ์ฃผ์š” ๋””์Šคํฌ์˜ ์‚ฌ์šฉ๋Ÿ‰์„ ํšจ์œจ์ ์œผ๋กœ ๊ด€๋ฆฌํ•˜๊ธฐ ์œ„ํ•ด ํ„ฐ๋ฏธ๋„ ์ ‘์† ์‹œ๋งˆ๋‹ค ์ƒํƒœ๋ฅผ ์‹œ๊ฐํ™”ํ•ด ๋ณด์—ฌ์ฃผ๋Š” ์ž๋™ํ™” ๋Œ€์‹œ๋ณด๋“œ ๊ตฌ์ถ• ๊ณผ์ •์„ ๋‹ค๋ฃน๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋ฆฌ๋ˆ…์Šค์˜ df ๋ช…๋ น์–ด๋ฅผ awk ์Šคํฌ๋ฆฝํŠธ๋กœ ์ „์ฒ˜๋ฆฌํ•˜์—ฌ ๋ฐ์ดํ„ฐ๋ฅผ ์ถ”์ถœํ•˜๊ณ , ์ด๋ฅผ ๊ฒฝ๋Ÿ‰ ๋ฐ์ดํ„ฐ๋ฒ ์ด์Šค์ธ SQLite์— ์ €์žฅํ•˜์—ฌ ์ผ๋ณ„ ์‚ฌ์šฉ๋Ÿ‰ ์ถ”์ด๋ฅผ ๊ธฐ๋กํ•˜๋Š” ์ฒด๊ณ„๋ฅผ ๋งˆ๋ จํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋ฐ์ดํ„ฐ ๊ธฐ๋ก์„ ์œ„ํ•œ ์…ธ ์Šคํฌ๋ฆฝํŠธ๋ฅผ ์ž‘์„ฑํ•œ ๋’ค, ์ €์žฅ๋œ ์ •๋ณด๋ฅผ ๋ฐ”ํƒ•์œผ๋กœ ํ„ฐ๋ฏธ๋„์—์„œ ๋ง‰๋Œ€๊ทธ๋ž˜ํ”„ ํ˜•ํƒœ์˜ ๋ฐ” ํ”Œ๋กฏ(bar plot)์„ ์ถœ๋ ฅํ•˜๋Š” ๋Œ€์‹œ๋ณด๋“œ ๊ธฐ๋Šฅ์„ ๊ตฌํ˜„ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋งˆ์ง€๋ง‰์œผ๋กœ ~/.bashrc ์„ค์ •์„ ํ†ตํ•ด ํ„ฐ๋ฏธ๋„์„ ์—ด ๋•Œ๋งˆ๋‹ค ์ž๋™์œผ๋กœ ์ตœ์‹  ๋””์Šคํฌ ์ƒํƒœ๋ฅผ ๊ธฐ๋กํ•˜๊ณ  ํ™•์ธํ•  ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ๋„๋ก ์ž๋™ํ™”ํ•จ์œผ๋กœ์จ, ๋ถˆํ•„์š”ํ•œ ํŒŒ์ผ ์ •๋ฆฌ ์‹œ์ ์„ ์ง๊ด€์ ์œผ๋กœ ํŒŒ์•…ํ•˜๊ณ  ์‹œ์Šคํ…œ ์ž์›์„ ํšจ์œจ์ ์œผ๋กœ ๊ด€๋ฆฌํ•  ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ๋Š” ํ™˜๊ฒฝ์„ ์ œ๊ณตํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

Hackers' Pub

RE: https://genart.social/@davidcarew/116178444886600923

I absolutely agree with @davidcarew about usefulness of #sed and #awk.

I am starting to dabble with #xsltproc for some #XML aware bulk modification.

I used #XSLT to convert an XML file into #wget commands to download additional XML files I needed for a project. (First file listed the base name of additional files, each in an element / node.)

It's amazing how satisfying and powerful it feels to know even a little #sed and #awk. They are just great tools
New post: "Genres, cuids and a bit of AWK
" - Using AWK to process the Genres data from the CAP bookshop sample ๐Ÿ‘‰ #AWK #SAPCAP https://qmacro.org/blog/posts/2026/03/03/genres-cuids-and-a-bit-of-awk/

New AWKzine Issue (#2) is posted. It's a Hexdump clone implemented in #gawk (#awk).
https://maplefish.com/todd/hexdump.html

(issues: https://maplefish.com/todd)

Hexdump (AWKzine Issue #2)

@autobrain Pitz: vocรช รฉ um dos pilares do Fediverso BR. O criador do bot que me colocou no pรณdio. O gestor de crises que talvez nem imagine quanta crise sua existรชncia resolve (a minha inclusive). Salve, mestre! ๐Ÿงก

#autobrain #Apresentaรงรฃo #FediversoBR #BatataFrita #TecnologiaRetrรด #BaralhoCigano #AWK #NaData #Autismo #GestรฃoDeCrises

GNU awk

From awk with love

Quote

This is a major release. The relevant part of the NEWS file is appended
below. A diff file from the previous release is not available
The online manuals have been updated.

https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2026-02/msg00011.html

#awk #GNUawk #regular #expressions #RegularExpressions #regex #programming #GNU #NotUnix #OpenSource #POSIX

If you've ever wondered what a crude multi-language syntax coloring #AWK #script might look like,
https://codeberg.org/m2rad0/blurb/src/branch/trunk/formatting_code.awk
blurb/formatting_code.awk at trunk

blurb - collection of static web authoring scripts

Codeberg.org