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Comment by dbolgheroni | Hacker News Reader

awk is also interesting because it's not just a language, it's a "model". It isn't something that you can't write with some lines of any other language but, because the loop is embedded, makes it easier to write utilities for the command line.

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You can easily wrap python with a small script that makes it more useful as command line filtering tool. Most of the bloat actually just comes from importing packages.

    #!/usr/bin/python3
    import re, sys, json, other, useful, packages
    def printf(s):
        print(s.format(**globals()))
    for NR, line in enumerate(sys.stdin):
        match = eval(sys.argv[1])
        if match:
            eval(sys.argv[2])

Then you can use this in command line as

    somecommand | pyawk.py "re.search(r'^(pattern)\s(otherpattern)', line)" "printf('{NR}) {match[1]}')"

I deliberately didn't pass pattern straight into re.search but rather provides the option to do other forms of parsing/matching in that argument, for example json parsing. I just spent 2 minutes writing this script so it's obviously not perfect and you probably won't be able to use it for json out of the box but give it a few more iterations and it will most likely work.

You can get the loop behaviour with ruby

    $ echo -e $'line one\nline two' | ruby -ne 'puts $_.split(/\W+/)[1]'
    one
    two

ruby's -n and -p options are venerable equivalents to perl's options which were present in version 1.0 waaay back in 1987 and they were there so it could be that drop in replacement for awk

ruby inherited a lot of structure and ideas from perl which it inherited from awk and that thought makes me irrationally happy

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