Gawk 4.0 Is A Major New Release

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Gawk 4.0 Is A Major New Release

Besides releasing libgcrypt 1.5 this week, another GNU project has been updated. Gawk 4.0.0 has been officially released as a major update to this popular free software utility. Gawk 4.0.0 presents several new end-user features along with revamped internals...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTYyNA

[AnonymousCoward]

I really don't see the need for awk any longer. Whatever awk can do, perl can do better (or ruby or something), and it's been that way for ages. Just let it die already.

[FireBurn]

Considering Michael hasn't mentioned Gawk before (you can tell this by the lack of links to previous Gawk articles) there's a surprising lack of explanations of what it actually is

[cobratbq]

+1, I had to look it up, actually, since I've never used it before.

[plonoma]

If you are like many computer users, you would frequently like to make changes in various text files wherever certain patterns appear, or extract data from parts of certain lines while discarding the rest. To write a program to do this in a language such as C or Pascal is a time-consuming inconvenience that may take many lines of code. The job is easy with awk, especially the GNU implementation: gawk.

The awk utility interprets a special-purpose programming language that makes it possible to handle simple data-reformatting jobs with just a few lines of code.

[AnonymousCoward]

plonoma, it is very poor style to quote a document (in this case, the gawk web site) without denoting it as a quote.

And aside from that, it still doesn't answer the question about why people should care about (g)awk nowadays. Perl does everything awk does, and a lot more and better.

[DeepDayze]

If you are like many computer users, you would frequently like to make changes in various text files wherever certain patterns appear, or extract data from parts of certain lines while discarding the rest. To write a program to do this in a language such as C or Pascal is a time-consuming inconvenience that may take many lines of code. The job is easy with awk, especially the GNU implementation: gawk.

The awk utility interprets a special-purpose programming language that makes it possible to handle simple data-reformatting jobs with just a few lines of code.

Perl works just as well but takes a little more coding to do the job (g)awk does.

[pingufunkybeat]

Because people are used to it, because it is fast if you are usef to it, there are millions of scripts out there depending on it, and every decent *nix sysadmin has used it at least once?

I mean, anything perl can do, javascript can do too

[curaga]

Awk is installed more widely than perl, as it is much smaller. Hey, even busybox has awk.

[bug77]

And aside from that, it still doesn't answer the question about why people should care about (g)awk nowadays. Perl does everything awk does, and a lot more and better.

I never took the time to learn perl, but I know how to use awk.
I can imagine a lot of enterprise boxes come with no perl installed (paranoid admins and such), but awk is pretty much everywhere.