awk

“AWK is a great hobby, if anyone's looking to get into a new one.”

“an AWK script would most likely be faster, shorter, and easier to maintain”

“CSV files parsed with custom reviewed AWK scripts can be 100% safe”

“Oil or fish and awk are perfectly fine for one liners”

“awk is about the same age but doesn't suffer the same problems.”

“awk and jq are minimal but don't make the same mistakes”

“Access to a well-established set of tools for operating on unstructured text”

“knowing a bit awk, perl and sed might help as well, as they tend to be available by default.”

“Don't need much more'n that to get yerself into all kinda trouble”

“Brian Kernighan isn't going to start charging a subscription fee for AWK”

“AWK is a fantastic language on its own and should be called out when used as such.”

“My favorite (and most ridiculous) application was using the qawk”

“that's what I tend to use if I ever need something beyond a simple substitution”

“awk syntax effectively requires learning a new language for complex logic”

“Three tools born in Bell Labs that still power every server, every pipeline”

“can accomplish in a few readable lines what people write long programs to handle in other languages”

“tired of waiting for grep/awk on multi-gigabyte logs”

“It doesn't change, is always installed on all POSIX platforms, easily interfaces with the command line, and is an easy to learn small language.”

“awk can do some heavy lifting too if the environment is too locked down”

“I generally like awk a lot for simpler CSV/TSV processing”

“you could learn awk or jq, which are arguably more generally- and widely-applicable than nushell”

“What if someone tried to enshittify awk? Good luck with that”

“Awk is short, easy to pronounce, and difficult to confuse with anything else.”

“Given curl, jq, and awk, you can create a quick MVP client for almost any api”

“all are better than awk/sed/shell scripts”

“this awesome tool for quick and dirty 1-3 line scripts to transform textual information”

“AWK is a tiny language that can be learned quickly, and it's ubiquitous”

“You can be confident your scripts will still work just the same in ten years.”

“its default field separator treats runs of spaces as one”

“awk is so much better than sed to learn given its ability”

“I've always found awk's "everything is global scope" as a huge limitation”

“awk already pretty much stopped changing very much decades ago”

“AWK, rc, and mk are the 3 big tools in my shell toolkit. It's great”

“awk helped me condense a lot of stuff into a small number of LOC”

“This pipeline may be significantly reduced by replacing cut's with awk”

“Associative arrays, and other features are indeed very powerful”

“Stop using awk, use a real programming language+shell instead”

“Awk is still one of my favorite tools because its power is underestimated by nearly everyone I see using it.”

“Honestly, yes, parquet and duckdb make all this easier than awk.”

“grep and awk are extremely fragile because they have to look at what's inside”