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The Awk Programming Language, Second Edition

awk.dev

1–10 of 12 posts

Re: The Awk Programming Language, Second Edition

#4
awk is a weirdly appealing and powerful language - if you do much text processing then it can be a real help.

It's one of those tools that benefits hugely from ChatGPT because every single thing you want to do requires looking thing up and working things out. ChatGPT really complements awk well.

Re: The Awk Programming Language, Second Edition

#7
post #5

That page, unless I missed it, doesn't say who worked on the updated edition. Was it the original authors?

The preface ends with the original authors names, so yes, I’d say they are behind the new edition.

Kernighan also lists the updated edition at the top of his web page

Re: The Awk Programming Language, Second Edition

#10
post #6

Did the popularity of AWK demise after Perl became ubiquitous?

Prior to Perl most text processing was done with unix pipelines and awk/sed/C. So Perl allowed people to stop writing C and also stop using lots of separate programs to do one thing. Many of the awk constructs survive in Perl such as running code once per line, // for regular expressions which implicitly work on the current line, $1/$2/$3 etc. so it's not too difficult to use Perl instead of awk.
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