I still use a little sed once in a while, but Perl has replaced most of the tool...

jstimpfle · on Oct 25, 2017

The advantage of awk is that it is faster in some cases and a little more convenient for simple command-lines due to automatic field splitting. The disadvantage is that it swallows errors silently even more than perl (I think).

augustk · on Oct 25, 2017

Awk is also a part of POSIX.

tmaly · on Oct 25, 2017

yes I agree, I have seen awk perform faster in some cases, but for the general case, I prefer something a little more flexible like Perl

Annatar · on Oct 25, 2017

I'd say that AWK's single weakness is a lack of built-in debugger or even `set -x` tracing mode like the shell has.

mathiasrw · on Oct 25, 2017

If you have access to npm in your environment then try rexreplace next time.

waynecochran · on Oct 25, 2017

Yep Perl* is a great swiss army knife that rendered sed and awk obsolete -- I am old enough (50) to have been thru this progression. It's funny to see awk and sed come back around.

(It's a little like functional programming being rediscovered when Lisp has been around since the dawn of time).

* I think Perl got carried away when it added objects and folks started writing large programs with it (although I have written some large scripts for biologists doing genetic studies -- which is interesting popular use case == there are google groups and O'Reilly books focused on this use case).

Also, Larry Wall really humped the shark with Perl 6.