m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
Awk is just too weird for normal people. I wouldn't even suggest reading that manual. If you can't do what you want with regexps and a pipeline of simpler programs, you might as well use perl.
<Looks around, yeah, this *is* a list for sysadmins of Linux....>
Reading the response, I realize you were serious, not being funny, as I thought.
Yes, I'm serious that if you don't already know awk, there is little to be gained from looking at it now. Perl can do everything awk can do and more, while shell scripts can do the simpler things.
Ok, there's no point to continuing this - I use whatever tool I feel like, and which is simplest to me to do the job: the *Nix way. I also know a perl bigot when I see one.
You seem to have missed all the places that I mentioned already knowing awk as an exception. I'm just not recommending taking the time to learn it if you don't already - and if you want to call logical conclusions for the reasons I posted bigotry, fine - be that way.
You *also* missed the reason I was pushing the original poster to read the man page, rather than just do what I said, without trying to understand what I was suggesting they do - they made a sytactical mistake that would have had the *same* result in perl - he missed the closing / on the expression
Sure, but perl would have told you 'search pattern not terminated at line xx', or you would have gotten this from running 'perl -c' to check syntax ahead of time. Would you care to disclose how many of your own hours you've wasted on the mysteries of awk before you learned to read that carefully?