Just to be clear, Cameron, I retired very early and thus have had no reason to use AWK in a work situation and for a while was not using UNIX-based machines. I have no doubt I would have continued using WK as one part of my toolkit for years albeit less often as I found other tools better for some situations, let alone the kind I mentioned earlier that are not text-file based such as databases.
It is, as noted, a great tool and if you only had one or a few tools like it available, it can easily be bent and twisted to do much of what the others do as it is more programmable than most. But following that line of reasoning, fairly simple python scripts can be written with python -c "..." or by pointing to a script Anyone have a collection of shell scripts that can be used in pipelines where each piece is just a call to python to do something simple? -----Original Message----- From: Cameron Simpson <c...@cskk.id.au> Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 2021 6:34 PM To: Avi Gross <avigr...@verizon.net> Cc: python-list@python.org Subject: Re: convert script awk in python On 24Mar2021 12:00, Avi Gross <avigr...@verizon.net> wrote: >But I wonder how much languages like AWK are still used to make new >programs as compared to a time they were really useful. You mentioned in an adjacent post that you've not used AWK since 2000. By contrast, I still use it regularly. It's great for proof of concept at the command line or in small scripts, and as the innards of quite useful scripts. I've a trite "colsum" script which does nothing but generate and run a little awk programme to sum a column, and routinely type "blah .... | colsum 2" or the like to get a tally. I totally agree that once you're processing a lot of data from places or where a shell script is making long pipelines or many command invocations, if that's a performance issue it is time to recode. Cheers, Cameron Simpson <c...@cskk.id.au> -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
