When was the last time you used sed and/or awk?

I'm thinking of preparing a lecture, for a High School Computer Club, on the command line tools sed and awk for data manipulation. The discussion will include some examples of using the command to mung a data set. I found the commands valuable over my technology career but wonder how relevant are they today?

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jomoenginer over 4 years ago in reply to jomoenginer +4

The advantage of using something like 'sed' or 'awk' or other shell type commands is that they are pretty much standard with most Linux type distros. Something like Python has to be installed separately…
neilk over 4 years ago +3

Sadly, I've never come across either! Neil
shabaz over 4 years ago in reply to neilk +3

And rarely do they have non-cryptic names. There's something for everyone in Linux, worth playing around with (say) a Pi's command line to explore, but finding all the interesting commands can take a lifetime…

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jomoenginer over 4 years ago

Daily
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Jan Cumps over 4 years ago in reply to jomoenginer

The real unix guys at work would call me a micky mouse because I used online interactive regex test pages to test my expression, instead of terminal and keyboard .
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jomoenginer over 4 years ago in reply to Jan Cumps

That's Blasphemy. I'm surprised they didn't say they could just script that for you.

But, wait, what? Your Unix systems are connected online? Scary.

I've been involved in creating Ansible scripts to automate Docker and other tool deployments so using regular expressions come in handy to deal with some of the lower level stuff.
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jomoenginer over 4 years ago in reply to Jan Cumps

That's Blasphemy. I'm surprised they didn't say they could just script that for you.

But, wait, what? Your Unix systems are connected online? Scary.

I've been involved in creating Ansible scripts to automate Docker and other tool deployments so using regular expressions come in handy to deal with some of the lower level stuff.
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