You can easily wrap python with a small script that makes it more useful as command line filtering tool. Most of the bloat actually just comes from importing pa

You can easily wrap python with a small script that makes it more useful as command line filtering tool. Most of the bloat actually just comes from importing packages. #!/usr/bin/python3 import re, sys, json, other, useful, packages def printf(s): print(s.format(**globals())) for NR, line in enumerate(sys.stdin): match = eval(sys.argv[1]) if match: eval(sys.argv[2]) Then you can use this in command line as somecommand | pyawk.py "re.search(r'^(pattern)\s(otherpattern)', line)" "printf('{NR}) {match[1]}')" I deliberately didn't pass pattern straight into re.search but rather provides the option to do other forms of parsing/matching in that argument, for example json parsing. I just spent 2 minutes writing this script so it's obviously not perfect and you probably won't be able to use it for json out of the box but give it a few more iterations and it will most likely work.