A finance-crunching program I am dealing with, cruncher.js, has annoying bugs difficult to troubleshoot. One common problem (whose triggering input is difficult to pointpoint and therefore avoid) causes this failure scenario:
Downloading account information...
Downloading today orders...
Downloading historical quotes...
Downloading historical quotes...
Downloading historical quotes...
Downloading historical quotes...
Once the line "Downloading historical quotes..." repeats for a third time, I know it's hit an infinite loop and never exits, nor skips whatever input case it can't handle gracefully.
How can I pipe this cruncher.js program to |awk, i.e. what inline awk script would detect in its input a 3rd (or 2nd if much easier) consecutive repeated line, and terminate there?
Or maybe instead of awk, using other common Linux/shell tools?
here is one way
$ yes | awk -v key='y' '{if($0==key)c++; else c=0} c==3{exit}1'
y
y
replace the key value with your repeated value; and yes with your stream generator.