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Comment by oefrha | Hacker News Reader

“It runs everywhere” (gawk) is very different from “it’s installed out of box everywhere” (awk). The latter can be used in provisioning scripts, shell script libraries/modules, etc. where the former usually can’t.

(Not saying gawk isn’t significantly better than awk for some tasks.)

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My claims were that GNU awk is everywhere that awk sees substantial use, and that it runs everywhere.

These were two separate claims, and are very different.

It is very rare that you see a system that awk is frequently used on that doesn't have GNU awk installed.

> It is very rare that you see a system that awk is frequently used on that doesn't have GNU awk installed.

Wait, what? Ubuntu server and macOS both have awk preinstalled (which is true for any POSIX) and gawk not preinstalled. Those are what I (and many other developers) spend 95% of my time on. And I do use awk frequently.

Edit: Okay, /usr/bin/awk is actually gawk on Ubuntu, so I was wrong about that. Still, macOS isn't very rare.

How many OS X users do you think are actively using awk in any of its variants? What percentage of total awk usage is on OS X, do you think? OS X may not be rare, but it seems highly unlikely that many OS X systems see frequent usage of awk.

How often does a MacOS user who frequently uses awk lack the ability to install gawk?

The claim under discussion in this deep subthread is "it is very rare that you see a system that awk is frequently used on that doesn't have GNU awk installed", so this is irrelevant.

That seems like an awfully pedantic position to take. The ability to install a program is irrelevant?

To be fair, /usr/bin/awk was mawk for a long time with Ubuntu. I remember getting in a heated discussion with GAWK’s maintainer that he should allow a way for [A-Z] to never match lower case letters (it does in some locales) so that we didn’t have to use stuff like [[:upper:]] and [[:lower:]], which do not work in mawk.

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