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GNU Awk has lots of extensions and is a relatively big language, but I definitely think you can learn most of the original Awk in two weeks - and you can certai
by Athas 6y ago
GNU Awk has lots of extensions and is a relatively big language, but I definitely think you can learn most of the original Awk in two weeks - and you can certainly learn enough to be useful in two hours. It's been a decade now, but my recollection is that when I spent a day or two idly reading the Awk book, and was able to immediately employ it in simple shell pipelines after reading not that many pages. I think Awk is useful once you've learned just a bit about it, and I don't think learning a lot about Awk is very useful - there are languages that are better suited for complex tasks.
- asicsp 6y agoFair enough, someone else made similar point that I had GNU awk in mind wrt all of awk And yeah, it's possible to start using basic field processing and regexp features (if you already know it) in 2 hours and learn most of it in 2 weeks. But, that quote could've been something like you could get started in 2 hours instead of saying one could know all of awk.