[LegionMammal978]

Is there any particular functionality which does exist in awk, but doesn't exist in Perl or Python without third-party libraries? I've always found "Python + built-in modules" more than sufficient for my text-manipulation needs. (Also, it lets me handle binary data and character data in the same program, which is very useful for certain tasks.)

[williamcotton]

It’s just that awk has a concise syntax that can make for some really quick one-liners in your terminal prompt. Why spend a minute or two in Python if you can get an answer in 15 seconds instead?

[kevindamm]

> Why spend a minute or two in Python if you can get an answer in 15 seconds instead?

Because you (or someone else) can run your Python later if needed, and have confidence the output will be the same.

Sure, there are some times when a one-liner is needed, and you can always put that one line in a document for others to run. I can think of many times when I was on-call and needing to grep some data out of logs that wasn't already in a graph/dashboard somewhere. When time is of the essence, or if you're really really sure that you won't need to run the same or similar thing ever again, even if the data changes. I even changed my shell to make up-arrow go through commands with the same prefix instead of linearly traversing command history because I had so many useful one-liners I re-ran later.

But as I've gotten more experienced, I've come to appreciate the value of committing those one liners to code as early as possible, and having that code reviewed. Sometimes a really useful tool will even emerge from that.