> "I want to learn AWK to learn AWK." Well, that's what I meant by "pure curiosity". ;-) Which is a perfectly valid reason to learn a language, of course, poss

> "I want to learn AWK to learn AWK." Well, that's what I meant by "pure curiosity". ;-) Which is a perfectly valid reason to learn a language, of course, possibly the best reason one can have. But I guess when I need a quick and dirty one-shot script, I'll stick to Perl for the time being. It's not officially standard like Awk, but it is available in the default installation of pretty much every open source Unix-like system I use except FreeBSD where it's one of the first packages I install. Hypothetically, Perl is also available on systems that are not very Unix-like, such as OS/400 (or "IBM i" as it is called these days, apparently) or VMS. (Hypothetically in the sense that I have never had direct contact with one of these systems and have no expectation I ever will, sadly. ... Well, maybe I should count myself lucky - either way, I will probably never know for sure.)