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I think I both agree and disagree. As you rightfully pointed, I wouldn’t do anything overly complicated with sed because it really is a line editor and anythin

I think I both agree and disagree. As you rightfully pointed, I wouldn’t do anything overly complicated with sed because it really is a line editor and anything which is not line based and can’t be explained simply in the context of using an editor will quickly seem clunky and overly complicated. I wouldn’t do anything period with awk. I agree with you that it’s just another programming language but one which feels extremely dated with both a terrible syntax and awkward semantics. The rare times I have encountered something done with awk it was either so simple it should have been done with sed or so complicated I wish a proper scripting language like python or perl would have been used instead. As far as I’m concerned, awk is a tool without a proper use-case. It’s always better to use something else.

twic 5y ago
Interesting! I don't find awk too strange; indeed i strongly prefer it to Perl, which i wrote a lot of around the turn of the century. These days i reach for awk for a lot of log processing, particularly when it needs to be stateful. For example, i have a log file with entries for remote clients connecting and disconnecting. An awk script can loop over that and keep an array of clients, adding and removing them as appropriate, and be easily tweaked to report different things - emit an event for each connection-disconnection pair, or track the number of clients connected over time, etc. I couldn't do that at all with sed. It would be more awkward with bash. It would be easy enough, if a little bit more verbose, in Python.