> Awk is something that I think every programmer and especially every sysadmin should learn I'd argue that it should be every programmer who doesn't already kn

> Awk is something that I think every programmer and especially every sysadmin should learn I'd argue that it should be every programmer who doesn't already know a scripting language like Ruby or Python. If you already know a scripting language, chances are the time saved between writing an Awk one-liner and quickly banging out a script in your preferred language is negligible. And if you ever need to revisit it and maybe expand it, it'll be much easier to do in your preferred scripting language than in Awk, especially the more complex it gets. I'm speaking from experience on this last point... At my work I wrote a very simple file transformer (move this column to here, only show lines where this other column is greater than X, etc etc) in Awk many years ago. It was quick and easy and did what it needed to. It was a little too big to be reasonable as a one-liner, though not by very much at all. But as we changed and expanded what it needed to do, it ended up getting to be a few thousand lines of Awk, and that was a nightmare. One day I got so fed up with it that I rewrote it all in Ruby in my free time and that's how it's been ever since, and it's soooo much better that way. Could have saved myself a lot of trouble if it were that way from the beginning, but I had no idea at that time it would grow beyond the practically-a-one-liner size, so I thought Awk would be a great choice.