Shell Programming and Scripting

Hey guys,

This is purely just a little bit of fun with awk. I realize this this isn't that constructive so please remove if need be.

Your goal:
Create a one line awk script that generates a diamond shape of any
size. Both the size of the diamond (measured by its middle line) and
the character used ("*" in the examples) should be stored in variables
that can be changed easily. Have fun!


Example diamond with the size of 5:

Code:

  *
 ***
*****
 ***
  *

Example diamond with the size of 10:

Code:

    **
   ****
  ******
 ********
**********
 ********
  ******
   ****
    **

My solution is below - I didn't spend too long on it so I imagine it can be improved a lot more.
Obviously DON'T LOOK HERE if you want to try this yourself from scratch without any clue!:

Code:

awk 'function g(n,v){V="";for(i=1;i<=n;i++)V=V?V sprintf("%s",v):sprintf("%s",v)}BEGIN{L=15;v="*";B=L%2?1:2;s=(L-B)/2;while(B>0){g(B,v);D=V;g(s," ");S=V;printf"%s%s%s\n", S,D,S;if(B==L){f=1};B=f?B-=2:B+=2;s=f?s+=1:s-=1}}'