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Comment by cryptonector | Hacker News Reader

> `curl ... | jq . | awk '...'`

Uhm, jq _is_ as powerful (more) as awk. You can use jq directly and skip awk.

(I know, old habits die hard, and learning functional programming languages is not easy.)

Yes, I know. I should've taken a different example. But it's also realistic in a way. When I'm doing one-offs, I will sometimes take shortcuts like this. I know awk fairly well, and I know enough of jq that I know invoking jq . pretty prints the inbound json on multiple lines. While I know I could create a proper jq expression, the combo will get me there quicker. Similarly I'll sometimes do:

  $ awk '...' | grep | ...

Because I'm too lazy to go back to the start of the awk invocation and add a match condition there. If I'm going to save it to a script, I'll clean it up. (And for jq, I gotta be honest that my starting point these days would probably be to show my contraption to an LLM and use its answer as a starting point, I don't use jq nearly enough to learn its language by memory.)

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