Re: grep, sed & awk @Roger Kynaston
I would be interested in hearing what you use for things more complicated than "simple substitutions and variable outputs from a string".
If you drop into Perl or Python, then I suggest that the learning curve for those tools was much, much greater than it would have been for awk. But if you know Perl already...
Strangely enough, I remember being first shown Perl back in 1990. One of my colleagues excitedly showed me a file, and said "What do you make of this?"
I said, "Well, there's a bit of awk syntax there, that looks like an associative array reference but in a C structured while loop, and that substitution looks like it is sed, but all these in the same source file?" And he said, "This is a new tool called Perl that tries to be all things for everybody. It takes the best bits from wherever".
Unfortunately, it took some of the worst as well. I think it was just after the release of Perl 3.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
