[Sorry for coming late into this discussion; I was on holiday until yesterday,
and am now working through my e-mail backlog.]
Simone Piccardi wrote:
> My only use of awk is for something like:
>
> awk '{print $N}'
>
> just because it short. If I need complex parsing that I cannot do with
> sed/grep/cut/tr I usually write a program (using my favorite scripting
> language, that's not perl nor awk...).
Our LPIC-1 training materials include chapters on sed and awk, which
instructors are free to use as options. We also cover shell programming in way
greater depth than is required for the exam, simply because while the exam
requires candidates to know the syntax of various Bash constructs, in real
life this doesn't really get you anywhere – to make productive use of the
shell as a programming language, you also need to know various programming and
debugging techniques, which we discuss at some length. After all, you can't
show somebody the contents of the food cupboard and then expect them to be
able to cook a three-course gourmet menu without telling them how to use a
chef's knife.
The nice thing about awk is that it has a very simple programming model that
follows logically from things like shell-style »while read …« loops and sed.
The other contenders in the field (Perl, Python, Tcl, Ruby, …), while they
have many advantages as programming languages, are much farther removed from
the »Unix philosophy«. You can do useful one-liners with awk in the middle of
a shell pipeline (which sort-of works in Perl if you're pretty savvy, and
doesn't work all that well in Python or Tcl; I don't touch Ruby with a 10'
pole so I wouldn't know). Also, awak solves some problems fairly
straightforwardly that the standard GNU core tools will punt on – ever tried
to swap two columns in a file using »cut«?
This is not to say that I think awk should necessarily be part of the LPIC-1
exam; I'd just like to mention that we *do* teach people the basics of awk in
order to prepare them for the real world out there. YMMV.
Anselm
--
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