[jcynix]

>awk really shoots itself so much with its lack of features that it so desperately needs!

That's why I use Perl instead (besides some short one liners in awk, which in some cases are even shorter than the Perl version) and do my JSON parsing in Perl.

This

diff -rs a/ b/ | ask '/identical/ {print $4}' | xargs rm

is one of my often used awk one liners. Unless some filenames contain e.g. whitespace, then it's Perl again

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

I've been using perl instead of sed because PCRE is just better and it's the same regex that PHP uses which I've been coding in for nearly 20 years. I still don't actually know perl, but apparently Gemini does. It wrote a particularly crazy find and replace for me. Never got around to using or learning awk. Only time I see it come up is when you want to parse some tab delimited output

[ptspts]

This is much safer: xargs -d '\n' rm -f --

[jcynix]

Just tried to use "-d" and learned that it's a GNUism which isn't available under MacOS, so it's not a portable solution. And neither was it available under BSD 4.3 when I learned about xargs the first time.

[jcynix]

Sure, but my example was just that and I actually use /identical$/ as the pattern. Sorry for the typo.

And I use this "historic" one liner only when I know about the contents of both directories. As soon as I need a "safer" solution I use a Perl script and pattern matching, as I said.

[poke646]

In this case the Perl one-liner would be conceptually identical, the same length, but more performant (no calling out to rm):

   diff -rs a/ b/ | perl -ane '/identical$/ && unlink $F[3]'