[sidlls]

awk is a fantastic command line application that is useful for filtering, basic computations and transformations that other basic utilities (e.g. cut, sort, etc.) + grep don't (readily/easily) provide. I suppose it might be a bit archaic these days, but for someone familiar with it, it's often faster to compose an awk command than to write even a very quick/short script in, e.g., python or perl, for certain things.

[fuzztester]

>awk is a fantastic command line application that is useful for filtering, basic computations and transformations that other basic utilities (e.g. cut, sort, etc.) + grep don't (readily/easily) provide.

All true.

But awk is also a programming language, not just a command line application or utility.

It has conditionals, loops, regexes, file handling, string handling, (limited) user-definable functions, hashes (associative arrays), reporting abilities and more.

In fact, the name of the original book about awk is The Awk Programming Language.

[tharne]

> In fact, the name of the original book about awk is The Awk Programming Language.

Great book. I read it after it was so enthusiastically endorsed here on HN. A lot of people said it was worth reading just to take in the excellent technical writing style of Brian Kernighan.

I would offer a strong second to that.

[fuzztester]

Cool. Yes, his style is good in his other books too, like K&R (C), K&P (Unix), and GOPL (Go), and The Practice of Programming.