awk
Fewer than 5 people recommend it so far, so there's no written verdict. Here is what commenters said.
4recommend
0warn against
Nov 19, 2025first mention
Jul 26, 2026latest mention
Why people recommend it
“Regex, SQL, Basic linux command line tools, awk.”
gives advice to IT consultantson “Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years”
“the shell, awk, sed and other commands (Chapter 12) were invaluable”
Show 2 more
“It is good to know grep, sed, and awk”
“LaTeX, vim, sed, awk, the whole Unix toolkit is getting a new lease on life”
Caveats and dissent
No one in these comments warned against it.
Often compared with
Who recommends it in their own words
Threads where it came up
- Using sed to make indexes for books (long) 1 mention
- I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs 1 mention
- Amber the programming language compiled to Bash/Ksh/Zsh 1 mention
- Is anyone still using Emacs? 1 mention
- Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years 1 mention
- The 800 page book that made me a web dev 1 mention
Data: awk.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 9
“I used awk and eqn and t/roff to make a university phone book”
“why I use egrep and sed in pipes along with awk”
“For small stuff I use bash / sed / awk / jq / yq / curl etc.”
“I use emacs, vi, ed, sed, awk all the time”
“Regex, SQL, Basic linux command line tools, awk.”
“the shell, awk, sed and other commands (Chapter 12) were invaluable”
“It is good to know grep, sed, and awk”
“LaTeX, vim, sed, awk, the whole Unix toolkit is getting a new lease on life”
“awk less but i have used it”