Perl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed

• perl5

  87 1,842 9.9 Perl

  🐪 The Perl programming language

  

• awk

  34 1,918 8.4 C

  One true awk

Right, "the one true awk" corresponds to a book written in 1988, very explicity. https://github.com/onetrueawk/awk

You were the one that that said POSIX awk to begin with, I was using your terms.

As far as shitting on the GMU tools, I don't think I've seen someone do that for over 20 years.

This is not a productive conversation. You can live life however you want

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• miller

  63 8,553 9.1 Go

  Miller is like awk, sed, cut, join, and sort for name-indexed data such as CSV, TSV, and tabular JSON

> This works really well if your problem can be solved in one or two liners.

My personal comfort threshold is around the 100-line mark. It's even possible to write maintainable shell scripts up to 500 lines, but it mostly depends on the problem you're trying to solve, and the discipline of the programmer to follow best practices (use sane defaults, ShellCheck, etc.).

> It go bad very quickly when, say, you have two CSV files and want to join them the sql-way.

In that case we're talking about structured data, and, yeah, Perl or Python would be easier to work with. That said, depending on the complexity of the CSV, you can still go a long way with plain Bash with IFS/read(1) or tr(1) to split CSV columns. This wouldn't be very robust, but there are tools that handle CSV specifically[1], which can be composed in a shell script just fine.

So it's always a balancing act of being productive quickly with a shell script, or reaching out for a programming language once the tools aren't a good fit, or maintenance becomes an issue.

[1]: https://miller.readthedocs.io/

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