I personally have found that AWK is a surprisingly good alternative to shells for scripts bigger than average. Why? 1. Portability (AWK is a part of POSIX) 2

I personally have found that AWK is a surprisingly good alternative to shells for scripts bigger than average. Why? 1. Portability (AWK is a part of POSIX) 2. Very clean syntax 3. Powerful associative arrays 4. Super-powerful string manipulations facilities 5. Easy shell interoperability As an example here is a simplistic build tool [1] I’ve developed in AWK. As you can check [2] it runs unchanged under Linux/macOS/Win (via Git Bash). [1] https://github.com/xonixx/makesure/blob/main/makesure.awk https://github.com/xonixx/makesure/blob/main/makesure.awk [2] https://github.com/xonixx/makesure/actions/runs/702594092 https://github.com/xonixx/makesure/actions/runs/702594092