Ask HN: Should I learn Awk or Perl? Or is that a bad question?

Re:Ask HN: Should I learn Awk or Perl? Or is that a bad ques... by asicsp on Thursday July 04, 2024 @10:10AM (#40875115)

>noticing a lack of literature on Perl on the command line

I have written a book on Perl one-liners with plenty of examples and exercises [0]. I've also written books on CLI text processing tools like grep, sed, awk and coreutils [1]. If you prefer just solving exercises, check out my interactive TUI apps [2].

>Is awk just better for this use case?

It depends on the kind of tasks you'd need to solve. I generally prefer grep, sed and awk first. Perl helps if I need powerful regexp and other niceties like the huge number of built-in functions and access to third-party libraries.

[0] https://learnbyexample.github.io/learn_perl_oneliners/

[1] https://github.com/learnbyexample/scripting_course#ebooks

[2] https://github.com/learnbyexample/TUI-apps

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Re:Ask HN: Should I learn Awk or Perl? Or is that a bad ques... by AnthOlei on Thursday July 04, 2024 @12:49PM (#40876303)

Oh wow. I went though some of the perl book you linked and I was noticing the examples were really familiar; I then realized you were the same guy who wrote the awk book I have been going though.

Your work is excellent! Thank you, I’ll buy a copy soon.

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