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

I find myself being totally lost on the command line when I need to do more complex stuff - a series of pipes between greps and cuts and the works. Recently, I finally took some time to try to learn some awk and it was life changing. I’ve been doing some awk puzzles, but it occurred to me that if I’ll be deliberately spending time learning a command line text processing tool, I may as well go the extra mile and learn perl, which I’ve heard is far more expressive than gawk.

I’m also noticing a lack of literature on Perl on the command line, I.e “perl -nae ”.

Is awk just better for this use case?

The tools have a lot of overlap. No need to choose one over the other, you can learn both. I don't write Perl but knowing how to read it comes in handy. AWK usually does what I need.

If you're looking at learning Perl then you'll find the https://perldoc.perl.org/ site very useful (you'll probably also have its content available on the command line via the perldoc command).

If you want more information about running Perl on the command line then start with https://perldoc.perl.org/perlrun (or `perldoc perlrun` in your shell)

Perl for sure, because it's much better than awk. Also perl has a huge set of libraries, awk has nothing.

How much time do you want to invest ?

Perl is more powerful but learning and remembering all (or a sufficiently more powerful superset of awk's capabilities) of it is going to take time. The peculiarities of its syntax is certainly not a small set.

All of awk on the other hand needs about 2 hours, if you have done some programming before.