Cool! Now do this with every line of awk you're asking someone else to maintain, give up, and then write it in a better, more explicit language instead.
Feels like I’m on Usenet again when I read comments like this.
Awk is mostly nice for one-liners and is something you can just write into a command-line ad-hoc. It’s good at that. I could write the same thing as a Python script but it would take longer, and I would need to know that Python is installed on the system—Awk has a larger install base and is found on “minimal” installs.
If you hate Awk, and think it’s stupid, don’t use it. Seems like a big waste of time trying to argue with people who like Awk. That’s the kind of discussion I remember from my experience on Usenet in the 90s, and it seems like some people haven’t learned to move on.
