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

i feel like awk is better for simple pipings and the likes, so i guess it depends on what you need to do. I find myself using awk a lot expecially with other programs

The case for Perl is just that it has no limits. You will never run out of tool if you go with Perl. That is what, I believe, makes the investment worthwhile.

Why Perl gets such a bad rap, then? I'll tell you.

I've used Perl for almost 30 years now, and I've never found any limits in the tool. This means every limit I found was _mine_. Many programmers feel bad when they find their own limits, but it doesn't have to be the case.

You should be OK with finding your own limits, and be willing to overcome them, and strive to become a Perl power user, just like the founder, Larry Wall.

If you choose this, to grow and improve and be better, and better, and better, then Perl is the best option.

It's up to you.

To me, having to be the compiler and have 100% test coverage for typos is a limit. TS is a lame, misguided attempt to correct that to let people keep using such limited languages for things.

>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

I highly recommend awk because you can learn it in 20 minutes [1]

So you can start by spending 20 minutes to learn awk, and then spend 20 years to learn Perl (and use awk in the mean time)

[1]: https://ferd.ca/awk-in-20-minutes.html