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The so-called standard unix tools are just historical artefacts, there's nothing particularly special about them other than they were the first. sed is an arcan
by shaurz 14y ago
The so-called standard unix tools are just historical artefacts, there's nothing particularly special about them other than they were the first. sed is an arcane language which in my personal opinion is not worth learning (maybe it was for you), and for all but the most trivial tasks it's probably a better idea to use a proper language like Python. After all, the whole reason for Perl's existence was that sed/awk/sh were lacking.
- webreac 14y agoI am a perl lover. I fully adhere to the idea that perl (or python or ruby or javascript) should be used instead of sed/awk/sh/grep/find each time we need to go beyond the basic usage of these commands. I have never said that everybody should know the arcane parts of sed (http://uuner.doslash.org/forfun/sedtris.sed http://uuner.doslash.org/forfun/sedtris.sed). The unix tools work best when they are combined together (with pipes). The basic usage of sed is very useful to combine unix commands. Knowing the basics of standard unix tools has always been a time saver for me. Here is an example of a command that I may need in some unusual cases: for i in $(awk '/PWP/{print $1}' machines) ; do echo $i; rsh $i df . ; done In my case, it does not worth being a script, because I may not have the same need before a month or two. Without unix tools, this would be a pain in the ass.