When perl came out we were living in horrific times. You had the choice of either Bourne, C or Korn shell. Automation was glued together in one of these with a series of grep, awk, sed, ls, test, commands glued together. Anything more complicated was written in C and called from one of these things.
Perl in one stroke collapsed the programming of C, text manipulation, the capabilities of all of the Unix utilities, and data structures into one system. For anything which wasn't subsumed into the monolith of Perl, you could easy access via backticks. It was very friendly in dealing with text streams, and that's what those call-outs in those back ticks spoke.
Yes, awk and sed were replaced by Perl, but more importantly, the unmaintainable nightmare that glued all of it together was wiped out.
> Yes, awk and sed were replaced by Perl,
I still use awk and sed semi regularly. I haven’t used Perl in over a decade.
1980s awk and sed aren't the same as the 2020s version.
They've become much more useful because of the influence of things like perl.
To see what I mean, here's SunOS 4.1.1's man page for awk and sed as grabbed from https://github.com/ambiamber/Run-Sun3-SunOS-4.1.1/blob/main/... and ran through groffer(1) . These are from 1989 and 1987 respectively. The core stuff is there but not much else.
Awk today is very much the same language it was in 1977 when it was introduced. Comparing your links with today's POSIX awk manpage doesn't yield a single thing Perl brought to awk. At best, while JavaScript syntax is even based on awk, you could say JavaScript regexpes are based on PCRE, and it wasn't clear whether use of capture groups/back references makes Perl regexpes accidentally Turing.
POSIX, right. POSIX sucks. POSIX anything is stuck 30 years ago. Nobody in 2023 really uses POSIX awk on some commercial UNIX like IBM AIX, they use GNU awk, that's the modern one I'm talking about https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/index.htm...
What are you talking about? There is no POSIX awk implementation, just a language spec and nawk AKA the one true awk. As shipped on Mac OS, whereas Debian ships mawk in addition to gawk. gawk is just much slower and unfortunately also buggy (crashes on a non-"C" locale with complex regexpes).
I was incorrect about 30 years. It's actually 35.
You were the one that that said POSIX awk to begin with, I was using your terms. I understand what you meant, why don't you?
As far as shitting on the GMU tools, I don't think I've seen someone do that in decades, especially just referencing the bottom of the man page like that.
As far as speed, I don't know how you're using these tools, but if gawk is your bottleneck and not i/o, there's probably smarter ways to do things.
This is not a productive conversation. You can live life however you want and if you're happy than I'm happy. We are definitely at an impasse. I'm off to bed.