Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on January 17, 2006 04:30 AM
There's nothing wrong with using awk. Where it's appropriate.
I've found that awk is stunningly fast (faster to complete a task than some "high performance" proprietary reporting tools are to initialize), and its small size (85 K for mawk, 793 K for gawk) make it a very useful tool which can be made available even in tight quarters. While it's got a relatively small feature set, it's a Turing-complete language which you can pretty much wrap your head around. The saw that Perl is a nice operating system, but what it lacks is a lightweight scripting language, has some truth to it.
If Python, Perl, Ruby, OCAML, or whatever, floats your boat and suits your needs, go for it, but no need to trash awk simply for its age.
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Old & in use = reliable
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on January 17, 2006 04:30 AMThere's nothing wrong with using awk. Where it's appropriate.
I've found that awk is stunningly fast (faster to complete a task than some "high performance" proprietary reporting tools are to initialize), and its small size (85 K for mawk, 793 K for gawk) make it a very useful tool which can be made available even in tight quarters. While it's got a relatively small feature set, it's a Turing-complete language which you can pretty much wrap your head around. The saw that Perl is a nice operating system, but what it lacks is a lightweight scripting language, has some truth to it.
If Python, Perl, Ruby, OCAML, or whatever, floats your boat and suits your needs, go for it, but no need to trash awk simply for its age.
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