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Comment by stevebmark | Hacker News Reader

Once you realize that awk, while useful, is really just a terrible programming language with terrible syntax that you have to write in a string, with random unreadable environment variables to try to hack in useful functionality, then you are finally free.

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Are there any modern alternatives out there?

Yes. It's ruby. E.g.

  ls -l | awk '{ print $9 }'

  ls -l | ruby -nae 'puts $F[8]'

Full-blown scripting languages are a poor fit for livecoding. (Which is really what shell commands are for.)

awk is a full blown scripting language too. It has a versatile implied top-level control structure + code golf qualities (which is a plus for livecoding). But it's also crazy that we switch a language when its top-level structure is a good fit.

I had to go and write one: http://tkatchev.bitbucket.org/tab/

Hey, that's nice.

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