[srean]

How much time do you want to invest ?

Perl is more powerful but learning and remembering all (or a sufficiently more powerful superset of awk's capabilities) of it is going to take time. The peculiarities of its syntax is certainly not a small set.

All of awk on the other hand needs about 2 hours, if you have done some programming before.

[thesuperbigfrog]

>> Perl is more powerful but learning and remembering all (or a sufficiently more powerful superset of awk's capabilities) of it is going to take time. The peculiarities of its syntax is certainly not a small set.

I disagree.

Perl's syntax is easy to learn for anyone who has used C-style syntax as found in C, C++, Java, Javascript, or C#:

https://perldoc.perl.org/perlintro

Perl's syntax is more similar to AWK and C-style languages than Python is.

That said, there is nothing wrong with Python or AWK. They work great and have their places. But it is silly how many people treat Perl like it is impossible to learn or read without ever having used it or seeing where it is used.

[srean]

Its OK to disagree.

I am quite comfortable with C and C++ and still find it hard to hold all of Perl and its operators and naming rules in my head, to keep $s, @, % and .(dot) and quotes etc straight. Granted it makes types more obvious than say Python.

AWK is smaller. There are fewer things to remember.

Perhaps a good comparison would be the size of a Perl pocket guide and a AWK pocket guide. Perl and Python are much bigger subsets of AWK.