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Comment by explaininjs | Hacker News Reader

Google Trends has sed crossing over perl about 5 years ago. Awk seems insignificant, which matches my expectation. (I’ve used sed but never awk, I don’t even know what it does)

Worth noting “sed” is “thirst” in Spanish, which has the potential to throw off the data, especially worldwide.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=p...

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awk is a fantastic command line application that is useful for filtering, basic computations and transformations that other basic utilities (e.g. cut, sort, etc.) + grep don't (readily/easily) provide. I suppose it might be a bit archaic these days, but for someone familiar with it, it's often faster to compose an awk command than to write even a very quick/short script in, e.g., python or perl, for certain things.

>awk is a fantastic command line application that is useful for filtering, basic computations and transformations that other basic utilities (e.g. cut, sort, etc.) + grep don't (readily/easily) provide.

All true.

But awk is also a programming language, not just a command line application or utility.

It has conditionals, loops, regexes, file handling, string handling, (limited) user-definable functions, hashes (associative arrays), reporting abilities and more.

In fact, the name of the original book about awk is The Awk Programming Language.

> In fact, the name of the original book about awk is The Awk Programming Language.

Great book. I read it after it was so enthusiastically endorsed here on HN. A lot of people said it was worth reading just to take in the excellent technical writing style of Brian Kernighan.

I would offer a strong second to that.

Cool. Yes, his style is good in his other books too, like K&R (C), K&P (Unix), and GOPL (Go), and The Practice of Programming.

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