Got to love awk. My weapon of choice for ad hoc arbitrary text processing and data analysis. I’ve tried to replace it with more modern tools time and again but nothing else really comes close in that domain.

Interesting Ruby (MRI anyway) has command line options to make it act pretty similar to awk:

-n adds an implicit "while gets ... end" loop. "-p" does the same but prints the contents of $_ at the end. "-e" lets you put an expression on the command line. "-F" specified the field separator like for awk. "-a" turns on auto-split mode when you use it with -n or -p, which basically adds an implicit "$F = $_.split to the while gets .. end loops.

So "ruby -[p or n]a -F[some separator] -e ' [expression gets run once every loop]'" is good for tasks that are suitable for "awk-like" processing but where you may need access to other functionality than what awk provides..

asicsp

I'd say it is more similar to perl than awk for options like -F -l -a -n -e -0 etc. And perl borrowed stuff from sed, awk, etc

I have a collection for ruby one-liners too [1]

[1] https://github.com/learnbyexample/Command-line-text-processi...