[usrbinbash]

> but the fact that is simple, fast and lightweight

I see awk as a DSL to be honest. Yes, it can be used as a general purpose language, but that quickly becomes, as you say, awkward :D

Like many DSLs, it is simple, fast and lightweight as long as it is used for it's intended purpose. Once you start using it for something else, these advantages evaporate pretty quickly, because then you have to essentially work around the DSL design to get it to do what you want.

[snitty]

DSL == Domain Specific Language?

[Rediscover]

Yes

[coliveira]

One simple thing I do with awk is to create a command processor: read one line at a time and do things on my data as a response. This is very useful because you can make your command as powerful as needed and call other unix tools as a result.

[rsolva]

Do you have an example of this that is available somewhere?