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The reason AWK is not widespread is that it's only great for one case: working on a stream of lines. It's a pretty narrow niche. Sure you can code anything wit
by BiteCode_dev 6y ago
The reason AWK is not widespread is that it's only great for one case: working on a stream of lines. It's a pretty narrow niche.
Sure you can code anything with it, but there is always another language that will be better at this other thing, and still decent at what awk does. Awk looks more like a DSL than a generalist language.
So why learn awk to save you a few minutes for the rare cases you do need it? Just learn Python/Ruby/etc, it's a better investment, and it has a better crossplateform story.
- jimbokun 6y ago> It's a pretty narrow niche. If you're working on any kind of Unix, it's a niche that you encounter almost constantly. > Awk looks more like a DSL than a generalist language. Yes, it is pretty much the ultimate text processing DSL. So if you need to process a text file a line at a time, in most cases AWK is the optimal solution. > and it has a better crossplateform story. I think AWK is available on almost every platform where you can install those languages?
- srean 6y agoThe reason AWK is so awesome is that it's only great for one case: working on a stream of lines
- blodorn 6y agoRegarding AWK being cross-platform, it is part of the POSIX standard. https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/awk.html https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/a...