+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                                                                              |
|  Dhananjaya D R                   @/logs   @/software   @/resume   @/contact |
|                                                                              |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+


Why I ditched grep for awk?
________________________________________________________________________________
                                                        
The team I work with writes jmeter scripts for performance testing. The team has
one script for basic validation of *.jmx scripts as a pre-commit hook to catch 
issues, but it didn't have a feature to catch ${}, ${_P()}, imbalanced JSON 
structures, which people often missed. So I added these cases with grep, but 
here comes the problem. The scripts are usually 150k to 200k lines, and my 
solution took forever to catch these issues. Later, I had to rewrite this in awk
which finishes the job in no time.

Why Grep Was Slow?
________________________________________________________________________________

[1] For each pattern (unresolved `${}`, `${_P()}`, imbalanced JSON), grep made 
    separate passes through my 150k-200k line files. its complexity becomes 
    O(n × m) - multiple passes through the file

[2] Each grep command creates a new process, and I was using a multiple greps in
    a pipeline, this overhead added up.
  

Why Awk Was Fast?
________________________________________________________________________________

[1] Awk can evaluate multiple conditions in a single pass through the file, 
    drastically reducing I/O operations. its complexity becomes O(n) - single 
    pass regardless of pattern count.

[2] Unlike grep which is pattern oriented, awk allows procedural programming 
    with conditionals and counters, making complex validations more efficient.


Source code
________________________________________________________________________________

I cannot share the original code — which is tailored specifically to my team's 
needs — here is a generalized JMeter script validator written entirely in awk. 
You can expand it to cover more cases if needed, or feel free to modify it to 
suit your requirements.

________________________________________________________________________________