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Every Linux Geek Needs to Know Sed and Awk. Here’s Why… - The Tech Edvocate
(www.thetechedvocate.org)
Sed is useful to understand linuxmasterrace jokes.
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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I dunno. I've been running *nix boxes since the 90s and only used sed and awk a handful of times. A handful as in 3-5. It just depends what you do.
I’m a macOS admin and I use sed fairly frequently in scripts. Can’t say I’ve had many uses for it or awk as a Linux user, however.
Wanna see something that makes even Perl look elegant and readable? Check out any sed script. Here's tetris, in sed: https://github.com/uuner/sedtris/blob/master/sedtris.sed
I'll probably need a few more lines in Python, but I can do everything i want and don't have to deal with the cryptic syntax. I once had to use awk because some extra pigheaded sysadmin refused to install Python on an AIX machine. Glad i don't work there any more.
Python isn't really a fantastic drop-in replacement for them, IMHO, though there is some overlap.
There are a bunch of Unix tools that let one concisely put a lot of logic into a single command line. They lower the bar to throwing a lot of logic into that single line.
Python's whitespace-sensitive and requires newlines. I guess theoretically you could use a HEREDOC or something, but realistically, if you use Python, you're going to go author a throwaway script and then execute it, which raises the bar to just including it in your command lines.
I think that Perl is probably closer to a middle ground between "application-oriented programming languages" and "single command line use". I think that it'd be reasonable to simply use perl -pie as an alternative to awk especially, though having sed's conciseness is still nice.
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