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Going to put a shameless plug here for the python awk replacement I made.

github.com/kespindler/puffin

Instead of learning a new language and new syntax, just use python!

If only it was as fast as awk. Is it?

No, the python interpreter itself takes about 0.03 seconds to start up on an i7. Awk and sed and friends are usually about 1/10th of that. So the python interpreter startup time dominates the cost for most simple tasks. It's not enough to notice when you're typing things by hand at the shell, but the difference can be painful if you're writing bash scripts. I use a similar python tool for command line work, but I always go for sed when I'm writing bash scripts that I plan to distribute.

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