Kernighan’s recent memoir has made awk pop in my head a lot more recently and allowed me to stay in shell script land vs bailing to Python. I used it plenty ov

Kernighan’s recent memoir has made awk pop in my head a lot more recently and allowed me to stay in shell script land vs bailing to Python. I used it plenty over the years, but with a lot of trial and error. Now, I see it as an event engine and it just flows naturally. It’s so great for generating reports from log files, simple csv, data dumps, etc. it’s sad to see it used as ‘cut’ in most scripts. It’s like a basin wrench. It has a small scope, but once you use it and grok it, you’d never want to do those things with another tool. That said, I have no use for features above POSIX. It’s essentially a DSL for me, and turning it into Perl ruins the simplicity. I’ll move on to a general purpose language that others can understand and maintain vs use esoteric extensions.