awk is cool (again)

Awk is lately appearing in HN more often.  I quite like awk, but having gone through Perl, bash, awk, I see people praise awk for being a POSIX compliant enhanced scripting language.  And while being true, I don't think this matters much to the commenters. They see it as an improved bash. And I think we're repeating the history.

Shortcomings that people see in bash, or awk, are solved in Perl. But people dismiss Perl for some reason, and they (we) are going to rediscover it in different forms. Perl is so optimized for scripting that it's really hard to beat. And it has a awk-like mode, so you can easily do the "/pattern/ {action}" thing.

 

Still, here are some threads on awk, with mentions to Perl.  I specially liked K (from K&R) awk.help file. That guy knows how to write!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28707463

https://earthly.dev/blog/awk-examples/

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spring19/cos333/awk.help

 https://ferd.ca/awk-in-20-minutes.html

https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.pdf

http://www.cs.unibo.it/~sacerdot/doc/awk/nawkA4.pdf

https://ia803404.us.archive.org/0/items/pdfy-MgN0H1joIoDVoIC7/The_AWK_Programming_Language.pdf