• BitSound@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    Does anyone here actually use awk for more than trivial operations? If I ever have to have to consider writing anything substantial with bash/awk/sed/etc, I just start writing a Python script. No hate to the classic tools, but Python is just really nice.

    • joshzcold@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      I’ve reached for some complex awk when I am looking to parse snippets of code where breaking out a full language parser would have been too much.

      One example is parsing statements from a Dockerfile but only within certain stages of the image. So I reach for regex range in awk and I can make something that works everywhere.

      Of course I probably could have done the same thing in python by controlling the beginning and end via variables, but I like awk sometimes.