walthervonstolzing, 1 year ago

awk predates perl as well as python by a pretty large margin (1978); it’s useful, of course, for processing things in a pipeline, but as it became obsolete as a general-purpose scripting language, users have had less and less of a reason to learn its syntax in detail – so nowadays it shows up in one-liners where it could be replaced by a tiny bit of cut.

I had worked through a good bit of the O’Reilly ‘sed & awk’ book – the first programming book I got, after being enticed by shell scripting in general. Once I learned a bit of Python, & got better at vim scripting, though, I started using it less and less; today I barely remember its syntax.