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gawk is pretty much everywhere now that awk sees substantial use, and presents rather great enhancements over POSIX awk[1]. I usually don't think that GNU tools
by kick 7y ago
gawk is pretty much everywhere now that awk sees substantial use, and presents rather great enhancements over POSIX awk[1]. I usually don't think that GNU tools make much sense to focus on, but gawk is something that's, generally-speaking, worth doing so. Especially given that it runs on almost everywhere under the sun.
[1] http://www.skeeve.com/awk-sys-prog.html http://www.skeeve.com/awk-sys-prog.html
- oefrha 7y ago“It runs everywhere” (gawk) is very different from “it’s installed out of box everywhere” (awk). The latter can be used in provisioning scripts, shell script libraries/modules, etc. where the former usually can’t. (Not saying gawk isn’t significantly better than awk for some tasks.)
- kick 7y agoMy claims were that GNU awk is everywhere that awk sees substantial use, and that it runs everywhere. These were two separate claims, and are very different. It is very rare that you see a system that awk is frequently used on that doesn't have GNU awk installed.
- oefrha 7y ago> It is very rare that you see a system that awk is frequently used on that doesn't have GNU awk installed. Wait, what? Ubuntu server and macOS both have awk preinstalled (which is true for any POSIX) and gawk not preinstalled. Those are what I (and many other developers) spend 95% of my time on. And I do use awk frequently. Edit: Okay, /usr/bin/awk is actually gawk on Ubuntu, so I was wrong about that. Still, macOS isn't very rare.
- kick 7y agoHow many OS X users do you think are actively using awk in any of its variants? What percentage of total awk usage is on OS X, do you think? OS X may not be rare, but it seems highly unlikely that many OS X systems see frequent usage of awk.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- justwalt 7y agoHow often does a MacOS user who frequently uses awk lack the ability to install gawk?
- twic 7y agoThe claim under discussion in this deep subthread is "it is very rare that you see a system that awk is frequently used on that doesn't have GNU awk installed", so this is irrelevant.
- justwalt 7y agoThat seems like an awfully pedantic position to take. The ability to install a program is irrelevant?
- strenholme 7y agoTo be fair, /usr/bin/awk was mawk for a long time with Ubuntu. I remember getting in a heated discussion with GAWK’s maintainer that he should allow a way for [A-Z] to never match lower case letters (it does in some locales) so that we didn’t have to use stuff like [[:upper:]] and [[:lower:]], which do not work in mawk.