Awk is cool. It's a full-fledged programming language that's there in anything remotely unix-flavored, but I mostly see it used in one-liners to grab bits of text from piped stdout.
But you can use awk as a general-purpose scripting language [1], in many ways it's nicer than bash for this purpose. I wonder why you don't see more awk scripts in the wild. I suppose perl came along and tried to combine the good features of shell, awk, and sed into one language, and then people decided perl was bad and moved on from that.
But you can use awk as a general-purpose scripting language [1], in many ways it's nicer than bash for this purpose. I wonder why you don't see more awk scripts in the wild. I suppose perl came along and tried to combine the good features of shell, awk, and sed into one language, and then people decided perl was bad and moved on from that.
[1] Random excerpt from NetBSD's source code https://github.com/NetBSD/src/blob/trunk/sys/dev/eisa/devlis...