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Comment by jgeralnik | Hacker News Reader

Really? The reason I should learn awk is "why not?" That has to be one of the worst reasons ever.

Not that I am bashing awk or anything. I'm sure there are many reasons to learn it. But why not is definitely not one of them.

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> bashing awk

I know this was an unintentional pun, but I still thought it was funny.

I had the same question the other day, and it turned into a spontaneous all-company "why you should use awk" lesson. If this kind of thing sounds cool to you, drop me a resume at david at loggly.com. We're at 1st and Mission in SF.

Short answer, it's a baby programming language that's more powerful than sed, quicker to write than python, and less confusing than cut.

I resent the use of the word "baby" -- I have seen entire quantitative trading platforms built in awk

Perhaps the ETrade baby uses that program? (ducks)

That was my reason, cause I love to learn everything. Why not learn everything? :)

I'll update the page with a more compelling reason. Thanks for bringing this up.

I've found that awk is one of those tools whose potential use becomes clear only after putting in some initial effort to learn it. Along with sed, sort, and others, awk has solved problems for me that would have otherwise been extremely tedious.

So the reason "why not be a master the shell" seems more about saving yourself time/being more efficient/knowing the tools at your disposal.

There are a lot of hacker types, myself and many friends included, for which "why not" is the reason we learn most of the things we do.

It's partly linked to intellectual curiosity, and on the other hand partly linked to how we procrastinate/stave off boredom: learning random things.

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