I was trying to maintain a program that wrote 200+ lines to a single file, using a single repeated function call–many of which had all NULL parameters. There were also occasional loops involved. The data was position based, so NULL writes counted.

I was just trying to figure out:

1. How many times a given function was called.
2. At what position actual data occurred.

I created a stub function of the original offending function that logged to a file what # call this was and the data passed. Then I copied the offending functions’ caller and substituted offending function calls using this script, which quotes all passed parameters (note: already quoted parameters would need a little more work):

BEGIN {
  OFS=","
}
/repeated_function_name/{

  for(i=1; i<=NF; i++)
  {
      if(i==1)
      {
          sub("[(]", "("", $i);
      }
      else
      {
          sub("^[ ]*",""", $i);
      }
      if(i==NF)
      {
          sub("[)]", "")", $i);
      }
      else
      {
          sub("[ ]*$", """, $i);
      }
  }

  print $0
  next;
}
{ print $0; }