Les Mikesell wrote: > On 9/17/2010 8:24 AM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote: >> >>> Proper scripting abilities are perhaps beyond reach for a short >>> course, but you could at least show off some one-liners or those >>> short, stunningly useful examples to help them get the idea that they >>> definitely should get their feet wet on it sooner or later. >> >> awk, awk! Perl's a day, minimum, by itself, but awk you can do in an >> hour or two, and have immediate results. > > But awk is a dead end that can't do a lot of things by itself. And So, what's the longest awk scripts you've ever written, Mike? It works wonderfully well for what it was intended - and mostly, I use it for reports or data conversion. > learning how to embed awk into other scripts is even more syntactically > obscure than just using perl in the first place. Besides, perl's '-c' > check and debug facilities make it much more usable to beginners than > awk's propensity to find errors mid-run (and worse, > mid-some-other-script because you had to embed it). Misuse of awk. mark "why, yes, I *have* written 100 and 200 line awk scripts to do data converstion and data validation"