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I'm sure use cases vary to some degree, but awk clicked for me when I had some data that wasn't formatted well. I didn't use it in a script, I just worked in t

by Timpy 6y ago

I'm sure use cases vary to some degree, but awk clicked for me when I had some data that wasn't formatted well. I didn't use it in a script, I just worked in the shell and kept iterating until it looked good, then redirected it into a text file. I use it for quick one-offs like this all the time now. I've also used awk to get button presses from an input stream on a MIDI controller. For me, I found that the up front cost of learning a few awk commands quickly made it's return on investment.

mauvehaus 6y ago
This. It's often a good enough tool for solving problems that technically require a specialized tool. Except learning the specialized tool takes an order of magnitude more time than iterating on awk to get a good-enough solution. I'm not proud to admit it, but I've used awk in a couple places where I should have properly used `expect' instead. Except, I don't know expect well and haven't gotten to the point where it was worth the investment in learning it.