I was first exposed to Awk when I started work at Bell Labs in the late 80s. Until then, I'd been using either Lisp or C exclusively and was really blown away by how simple some things were in Awk. I used it with impunity to munge all sorts of data for input into fault prediction tools I was working on. Speed was never an issue for me, so I never explored the potential improvements offered by 'awkcc'. Although perl was becoming the new hotness at that time, Awk remained my goto tool for many years.
If you are interested in learning Awk, I highly recommend "The AWK Programming Language" by Aho, Kernighan, and Weinberger. It's about the same size as the original "The C Programming Language" and is equally well-written. Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13451454
If you are interested in learning Awk, I highly recommend "The AWK Programming Language" by Aho, Kernighan, and Weinberger. It's about the same size as the original "The C Programming Language" and is equally well-written. Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13451454