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I’m a bit surprised by this. It surely depends on the use case. I tend to use awk for the same reasons as the parent (smaller to write and remember) and that the pattern-action structure works really nicely once you get used to it.

That depends on what you are doing. Which test did you run?

Around 10 years ago I rewrote markdown.pl in awk and it was almost 20 times faster. The speedup came from both a much faster startup time and a much faster (albeit simpler) regexp implementation.

There are many AWK implementations, OSX I think have subpar AWK. GAWK was fast, last time checked.

what script, and which awk?