http://www.osnews.com/story/20055/The_Great_Language_with_a_Strange_Name Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2013, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Thu, 23 May 2013 12:37:36 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://www.osnews.com/thread?322993 http://www.osnews.com/thread?322993 What can I say... Impressive
How far we'll go like this? Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Punktyras) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?322998 http://www.osnews.com/thread?322998 (g)awk is a practical, relatively straightforward text processing language. I use it several times a week for ad-hoc processing / reporting (I work on a data warehouse project).

Note that there is a free gawk book available online:
http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/

--------------

P.S. Nice little article from IBM, BTW. Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (anomie) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?323061 http://www.osnews.com/thread?323061 Just out of curiosity, why are you posting this now, 8 years after it was put online? Did it show up in a recent feed or something (I notice that it said it was updated July 3, 2008, but I can't imagine why -- maybe some typo was fixed)?

Of course, it isn't like awk has changed much in the last 8 years, I suppose And best of all, we don't have to wait for the rest of the series, since it too was published 8 years ago:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-awk2.html
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-awk3.html

And Daniel Robbins also wrote a series on sed, 9 years ago:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-sed1.html
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-sed2.html
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-sed3.html

For a site with such an easily edited URL scheme, it sure does try to make it hard to find other articles in serieses or columns. Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (BringBackAnonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?323087 http://www.osnews.com/thread?323087 Suite, nicely linked :-) Tue, 15 Jul 2008 22:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (thavith_osn) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?323756 http://www.osnews.com/thread?323756 What the hell? To quote what ESR said about Awk in "The Art of Unix Programming" ( http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch08s02.html#awk ):

{{{{{{{{{{
A case study of awk is included to point out that it is not a model for emulation; in fact, since 1990 it has largely fallen out of use. It has been superseded by new-school scripting languagesâ€"notably Perl, which was explicitly designed to be an awk killer. The reasons are worthy of examination, because they constitute a bit of a cautionary tale for minilanguage designers.

The awk language was originally designed to be a small, expressive special-purpose language for report generation. Unfortunately, it turns out to have been designed at a bad spot on the complexity-vs.-power curve. The action language is noncompact, but the pattern-driven framework it sits inside keeps it from being generally applicable â€" that's the worst of both worlds. And the new-school scripting languages can do anything awk can; their equivalent programs are usually just as readable, if not more so.
}}}}}}}}}}}

As someone who eats, lives and breathes Perl almost everyday, including for some "more serious" applications and APIs development, I find Awk to be incredibly limited, confusing, and kludgy. Perl is much more consistent, does not enforce awk's line-based coding (though it can be added using some http://perldoc.perl.org/perlrun.html command line flags), and is a serious programming. So I've noticed that I've been using variations on "perl -e" instead of Awk (and instead of sed) instead.

Awk knowledge is useful in understanding other people's old shell code, but it's a stupid and old language that falls between the chairs and should be put to sleep. Just do yourself a favour and use Perl or Ruby or whatever. Sun, 20 Jul 2008 13:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (ShlomiFish) Comments