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Personally, I don't think that it's worth learning if you don't already know it, but the awk book is really an enjoyable read, not particularly wrong, and will show what you can do with the language so you can make a more informed decision whether to learn it. In a way, awk, like sed, cut(1), paste(1), comm(1) is closer to the original Unix design philosophy of pipeline composition of simple, single function tools. cut, paste, and comm are simple, single function. sed is programmable, and awk even more so, but they're still optimized for being used in pipelines. Perl still has lots of options designed for pipeline usage (-p, -n, -a, -0, -F), but was always capable of doing general purpose programming, and python is primarily general purpose programming. Personally, I've never learned sed, cut, paste, or comm; the only traditional text processing tools I use are sort & uniq. I know awk, but the one time I wanted to use it in the last 5 years in an official script, I was shouted down by confused youngsters. I use perl for one liners, and python for any nontrivial scripting. |