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Comment by Zhyl | Hacker News Reader

This article is such a ride. `grep`, `ls` and `cd` then BAM - `awk`.

"Here's a hammer, here's a chisel, here's a hand saw aaaand... here's a petrol powered jackhammer with a circular saw attached."

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I think it might have been generated by AI. A human would have noticed huge discrepancy between simple examples with grep and ls and the magic AWK script that would basically deserve a separate article just to grasp how it works.

I think a lot of people underestimate awk or aren't aware of its capabilities - I used it quite a lot when I was new in my career before really understanding it. There's enough awk snippets floating around that you'll see it in folks' toolkits next to sed & grep even though they're just using a couple preset scripts.

I didn't really understand what it was capable of until I had a colleague use it to parse the output a CLI tool with no actual reasonable machine-readable output - something like a 100 line awk script to turn some hardware vendor's joke of a config tool into output that could be piped into another script. That's when I understood what awk was, and that my colleague might have been the devil.

I don't think anyone is arguing otherwise but that command is out of place there. Way more complex than the rest and poorly explained.

Anyway, TIL the existence of grep -e.

Awk is powerful, but I find it more portable/easy to understand implementing much of it in Python or Perl 5 these days.

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