The Awk Programming Language, Second Edition | Hacker News Reader

The Awk Programming Language, Second Edition

awk.dev

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awk is a weirdly appealing and powerful language - if you do much text processing then it can be a real help.

It's one of those tools that benefits hugely from ChatGPT because every single thing you want to do requires looking thing up and working things out. ChatGPT really complements awk well.

The Awk Programming Language, Second Edition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36517525 - Jun 2023 (158 comments)

Yup, since that was only a few months ago, the current repost counts as a dupe.

Reposts are fine after a year or so. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

For any folks who appreciate old UNIX things, check out Unix a history and memoir. It’s written by the one and only - Kernighan and he talks about people like Aho. Awesome book

That page, unless I missed it, doesn't say who worked on the updated edition. Was it the original authors?

The preface ends with the original authors names, so yes, I’d say they are behind the new edition.

Kernighan also lists the updated edition at the top of his web page

Yes! Going to order my copy soon. Great to see these classic tools evolving and hopefully winning new fans from up to date resources like this.

Did the popularity of AWK demise after Perl became ubiquitous?

Awk was always a tool for use in shell scripts and one liners, and is still going strong.

Perl, not so much.

Perl for one-liners is extremely common. It was built with that in mind.

Prior to Perl most text processing was done with unix pipelines and awk/sed/C. So Perl allowed people to stop writing C and also stop using lots of separate programs to do one thing. Many of the awk constructs survive in Perl such as running code once per line, // for regular expressions which implicitly work on the current line, $1/$2/$3 etc. so it's not too difficult to use Perl instead of awk.

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