On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 03:27:07PM -0800, Randal L. Schwartz wrote: > Everything I used to know about sed, I've forgotten once learning Perl.
It seems that every decade has its own fashionable Unix scripting language. The original scripting language, used in the 1970's was sed. But awk became the fashionable language in the 1980's, then perl in the 1990's, and now python in the 2000's. Who knows what will be next? If you have time to spare, it certainly could be useful to learn all of these languages. But if you're going to learn just one of them, then I vote for sed. You will still encounter environments where sed is the only one of these languages available (as Ingo pointed out, the OpenBSD installer is one such example). It isn't really necessary to keep up with fashion, you can just stick with the historical standards.
