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by abecedarius 1743 days ago
A nice thing about awk vs. Perl/Python: there's a small focused set of things to learn. Once you learn them you're done.

This suggests an opening for a Perl/Python intro focused on the exact same tasks, admittedly. That seems more realistic for Perl -- unless there's someone who writes Python one-liners at the shell?
2 comments
r-bar 1742 days ago
I don't think true python "one liners" are a thing, but the awkward thing about awk is sits in this place where what you are doing is complicated enough you need awk, but simple enough you need a one liner? Those cases have been exceedingly few and far between for me enough that every time I want to reach for awk I have to go lookup how to do anything more complex than printing fields. That completely defeats the point of the quick one liner.

May as well open up vim, write my 7 lines of python, and run it. Because I use it everyday and didn't have to look anything up it ends up far faster. Then when I am done I either delete it, throw it in a scripts directory, or make it part of some existing infrastructure repo. Now if I keep it because I used python it is much more readable than the awk 1 liner would have been.

I have tried in earnest to memorize awk's idiosyncrasies multiple times now. By the time I go to use what I learned the last time it is months later and I have forgot enough I need to go look stuff up.

So in a way, here I am: The guy that writes "one liners" in python.

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lbhdc 1742 days ago
I think that is a good point, that often writing a short python script is usually the best solution.

I use awk (and python) daily at work. I work with a lot of flat files, and I use awk when I am doing data quality checks. One of the "sweet spots" it hits for me is when I need to group data by value, or other relatively simple aggregations.

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abecedarius 1742 days ago
Yeah, it's a different world from when I learned Awk. You might enjoy the (very short) book by the creators just because it's a great focused expression of the Unix way. But nobody needs to learn it.
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fomine3 1742 days ago
Perl is sometimes "better awk".
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u801e 1742 days ago
perl actually has a one-liner way of invocation that's modeled after awk.

For example, to print the first field of a line work the default delimiter could be accomplished in perl by running:

    perl -ane 'print $F[0], "\n"'
Where $F[0] is the equivalent of $1 in awk.
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