Wasting time with gawk while parsing lsof output

So I wanted to parse lsof, to see on what ports was a machine accepting connections. Normally one would write something like:

# lsof -Pn -i | grep LISTEN | awk '{print $9}' | cut -d: -f2 | sort -n | uniq
22
111
6066
7011
7015
7077
8080
10050
35735
37480
39118
44262
44444
52539

You get a sorted list of the open ports and are done with it. But why invoke four different programs to do extraction and sorting, when gawk is a complete programming language? Yes it is possible to do it with gawk in one go (and learn something in the process):

# lsof -Pn -i | awk '/LISTEN/ { split($9, a, ":"); b[a[2]] = 1; } END { n = asorti(b, c, "@ind_num_asc"); for (i = 1; i <= n; i++) { print c[i]; } }'
22
111
6066
7011
7015
7077
8080
10050
35735
37480
39118
44262
44444
52539

The /LISTEN/ effectively greps the lsof output for lines containing LISTEN and executes on them the code in curly braces to its right. Which splits the 9th column into an array using : as a delimiter. In awk arrays are indexed from 1 and the indices are strings (make a note of that).

END is a special match that executes the code in curly braces to its right after we’ve finished reading the input data. So, here is where the printing is done. Using the asorti() function we obtain a new array, indexed based on the values of the indices. We use @ind_num_asc to ensure that the order is 1, 5, 10, 15 and not 1, 10, 15, 5 as it would, should the indices be treated as strings. Finally, we can print the elements from the new array.

This would not be easily possible with awk / nawk, because as the gawk manual says:

In most awk implementations, sorting an array requires writing a sort() function. This can be educational for exploring different sorting algorithms, but usually that’s not the point of the program. gawk provides the built-in asort() and asorti() functions.

Somehow this reminds me of Knuth vs McIlory but of course I am neither.