Studying and awk came up.
Spent about an hour and I see some useful commands that extend past what “cut” can do. But really when dealing with printf() format statements is anyone using awk scripts for this?
Or is everyone just using their familiar scripting language. I’d reach for Python for the problems being presented as useful for awk.
Grep is fiiiiine.
sed is okay but a little nasty, when your sed script is longer that one search-replace command you gotta ask yourself what you’re doing really (yes, sed is a full-featured Turing-complete programming language, if you go far enough into the man page).
When I see awk in any stackoverflow recipe, I just say ‘fuck it’ and rewrite the whole thing in Python. Python is included into the minimal system image in Debian, the same as awk, but is way less esoteric, and you can do python -e 'import os, sys; commands;' for a one-liner console script.
And if you want to talk about portability, try writing scripts for Android 4.4 ash shell. There’s no [ ] command. You do switch/case to compare strings.
No, and I don’t think I will learn another tool for something that I can already do using grep/sed/find commands, which I know by heart.
