[drongoking]

Sure, but you can invoke nearly all languages (and write one-liners) at the command line, e.g.:

python -c 'import sys; f=open(sys.argv[1]);print(len(f.readlines()))' .zshrc

But I wouldn't recommend python as a good one-liner language. So the question remains, what is awk particularly good at?

[core-questions]

Think of Awk as being to traditional tab or whitespace separated Unix command output, as `jq` is to JSON command output. Extract a field, loop and iterate, template output, etc.

Now remember, this was popular when perl wasn't even something you could depend upon on all systems.

These days there's no reason you should even do anything terribly complicated in a nasty oneliner. Just save a nice function somewhere and call it with a concise alias.

[kd5bjo]

Awk splits lines into numbered fields, so it’s really convenient for things like extracting and reordering columns from a csv file. For example, getting the second field of every line is:

  awk -F, '{ print $2 }'

[markus_zhang]

I recently tried csvsql and it seemes to be a stronger tool to process csv files?

[em500]

> But I wouldn't recommend python as a good one-liner language. So the question remains, what is awk particularly good at?

Processing regular (i.e. machine-, not human-generated) tabular text files line by line. If you already know Python there are probably few reasons to learn awk.

One of those could be working in constrained environments where you have awk but no Python. Awk is part of POSIX and part of Busybox, so there are almost no environments which have a working Python installed but no Awk, while the reverse is common enough (e.g. embedded systems). Apple plans to remove Python, Perl and Ruby from the default MacOS install in the next version, but probably not Awk (POSIX).

[drongoking]

Good answers.

(And I hadn't realized Apple was planning on getting rid of Python, Perl, and Ruby from default installs! Wow.)