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IMHO the nice thing about sed&awk is that a quick cheatsheet that covers most usage fits nicely on one page. Perl, in contrast, is more a 'proper' language and
by jabl 4y ago
IMHO the nice thing about sed&awk is that a quick cheatsheet that covers most usage fits nicely on one page. Perl, in contrast, is more a 'proper' language and the Camel book is a pretty chunky tome. If you're going through all the trouble of learning a language in that space, you might as well go with something like python. Though admittedly python isn't a very good sed/awk replacement.
- kqr 4y agoWho said you had to learn the entirety of Perl? I've been using Perl as an awk replacement for soon five years and I barely know a lick of Perl outside of what I need to use it as awk. If you use it that way, it's a much smaller language. (That said, I do still have the tabs of perldata, perlobj, perlmod, and perlop open because I want to learn it better.)
- rtpg 4y agoWhat does this look like in practice? Does Perl have a similar control flow syntax to awk?
- jrumbut 4y agoIt actually does (to an extent). There are BEGIN and END blocks (not used that much in regular scripting but they exist). There are also a bunch of perl command flags that can make things more awk-ish or sed-ish. This random blog post gives something of the flavor. https://lifecs.likai.org/2008/10/using-perl-like-awk-and-sed.html https://lifecs.likai.org/2008/10/using-perl-like-awk-and-sed...
- kqr 4y agoThere's one fairly obvious error in that article: the fields are $F[0] etc, not @F[0]. Otherwise yes, that's a good way to make Perl look like awk. I personally translate awk concepts to more idiomatic Perl (I had no idea about -MEnglish, for example) but the concepts are still the same.
- jrumbut 4y agoYou're right, but it will still work as written.