Perl is not bad because it is feature complete. Perl might even be good, except that it is dead. > if your argument boils down to "Awk and Bash are ugly and ou

Perl is not bad because it is feature complete. Perl might even be good, except that it is dead. > if your argument boils down to "Awk and Bash are ugly and outdated" Not at all. However, Awk was written almost 50 years ago. The awk book is good and it is very true that the thing is installed most everywhere so if you're already invested in it and it does everything you want, keep using it of course. But it just might be possible to improve on a tool after half a century. I simply shared new tools, that if you like awk, might really be up your ally. They might not be packaged with your favorite package manger anytime soon but you can grab them with cargo - if that's not portable enough so be it. No harm no foul.