Re:The State of the Awk (2020)
by alganet on Thursday January 19, 2023 @12:48PM
(#34443226)
A capture group is not "too big", sed has them. It's a reasonable feature request for a small tool.
sh, awk and sed are fine. They are easy, small, powerful tools that are easy to compile and understand.
Perl, python, nushell, etc. The options listed here are great if you're writing cute snippets on the terminal or hacking together some higher level automation.
These more elaborate tools, however, are terrible if you're trying to be lean in the build/bootstrap process and have a small set of auditable, easy-to-compile tools.
sh, awk and sed are fine. They are easy, small, powerful tools that are easy to compile and understand.
Perl, python, nushell, etc. The options listed here are great if you're writing cute snippets on the terminal or hacking together some higher level automation.
These more elaborate tools, however, are terrible if you're trying to be lean in the build/bootstrap process and have a small set of auditable, easy-to-compile tools.
The graph on this page illustrate the bootstraping problem well: https://bootstrappable.org/projects/mes.html
These small 50+ years UNIX tools that have zero build dependencies are around for a reason: they are small and have zero build dependencies.