I use awk every day because I need state (I work with text files full of sections and subsections) but I am sure that there has to be something better out there.
What is the definitive tool to process text? Perl? Haskell? Some Lisp dialect?
What is the definitive tool to process text? Perl? Haskell? Some Lisp dialect?
Definitive? Being snarky, the one you have already installed and are familiar with. Like most I use Awk for one-liners, Perl if I need a little more or better regexes in a one- or two-liner. For the last several years I've been using TXR[1] if it gets complex. Lately I've been doing more fiddling with JSON than text and I'm using Ruby/pry and jq[2].
https://gist.github.com/rlonstein/90d53fdeea31d2137737
about a matter related to the hash bang line in the script.
TXR has a nice little hack (that apparently I invented) to implement the intent of "#!/usr/bin/env txr args ..." on systems where the hash bang mechanism supports only one argument after the interpreter name.
In the interest of fair and accurate disclosure, I earned my bread for 3.5 years debugging Perl code for a living and I've also had formal education in Perl programming at the university. I would never want to do that again.