RMS says: "Use BSD, for goodness sake!"

[Paul Chvostek]

On Thu, Jun 26, 2003 at 12:35:53PM +0100, Peter McGarvey wrote:
> 
> Does anyone actually USE awk?
> 
> Other than to filter columns that is.

Unless it's absolutely vital to use something else, yes.  Awk has been
around forever, and behaves in a more predictable and consistent fashion
even than perl (due at least in part to the smaller toolset it offers).

http://www.it.ca/software/pmlw is an example of something that goes
beyond just filtering columns.  I've written many things over the years
that were perfectly acceptable in awk even though they would have been
equally function in perl.

My main (though possibly obsolete) reason:

# uname -sr
FreeBSD 4.8-RC
# ls -l /usr/bin/awk /usr/lib/libperl.so.3
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  160368 May 15 15:39 /usr/bin/awk
-r--r--r--  1 root  wheel  661096 May 15 15:40 /usr/lib/libperl.so.3

-- 
  Paul Chvostek                                             <paul at it.ca>
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