Hacker News Reader

awk is one of my favorite utilities. It's my go-to tool for any ad-hoc data reformatting and quick reports. My latest use was taking CSV files of transaction data from WePay and creating ledger [1] entries.

sed is pretty cool too but it feels a lot more arcane to me than awk.

[1] http://www.ledger-cli.org/

View on HN

sed is just a cut down version of ed. Natural evolution of UNIX syntax came mainly from the 'one true' editor.

I use awk more as a anonymous function at the end of a pipeline nowadays and mainly for small stuff where I'm too lazy to use cut or when grep sed and tr may not be sufficient for complex filtering.

Surprised there isn't more of a response here on this site. Even users that don't use awk directly use a language which has been directly influenced by it like ruby and of course the original chainsaw perl.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com