Comment by mplanchard

I love awk, and I find myself reaching for it a fair bit. One of the main things I use it for is “sed with state,” so for things like matching on a line, but only if it was preceded by some other line. I find this to be really useful for creating one-off linters, for example I made one recently to check all our migration files for CREATE INDEX without CONCURRENTLY on a particular set of very large tables where it would cause issues. Since sql statements can be spread over multiple lines, it was difficult to write a straightforward match, but awk can track state like “I’m in a create statement,” “I’m creating an index,” etc. across multiple lines, which allowed me to cobble together something that has worked well for about a year now.