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  • Author Author: colporteur
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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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  • Had you asked a few weeks ago, I would have said I last used it about 10 years ago. But someone asked me a sed question a few weeks back. I think it's handy having knowledge of such tools, and the underlying regexp is still handy to know too, but today I cannot recall much except say how to identify the beginning of a string, and how to match on a set of characters, etc. But I still have a regexp book somewhere just in case the need crops up.

    Since you mention specifically data manipulation, if a programming language is preferred then there are preferred or popular languages. For that, Python would be among the top few preferences for data manipulation for many I think (and there are more specialized languages too, I'm just picking an all-rounder) - and is encountered in many places, not just on a computer's command line. So today for me that would be my preferred choice if I had a choice, but I wouldn't feel extremely uncomfortable if I had to do one-off manipulation with sed occasionally. Personally I wouldn't use it for running (say) regular jobs, I would prefer a program in say Python, but that's just me, others would have other preferences.

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  • Had you asked a few weeks ago, I would have said I last used it about 10 years ago. But someone asked me a sed question a few weeks back. I think it's handy having knowledge of such tools, and the underlying regexp is still handy to know too, but today I cannot recall much except say how to identify the beginning of a string, and how to match on a set of characters, etc. But I still have a regexp book somewhere just in case the need crops up.

    Since you mention specifically data manipulation, if a programming language is preferred then there are preferred or popular languages. For that, Python would be among the top few preferences for data manipulation for many I think (and there are more specialized languages too, I'm just picking an all-rounder) - and is encountered in many places, not just on a computer's command line. So today for me that would be my preferred choice if I had a choice, but I wouldn't feel extremely uncomfortable if I had to do one-off manipulation with sed occasionally. Personally I wouldn't use it for running (say) regular jobs, I would prefer a program in say Python, but that's just me, others would have other preferences.

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