[conspire] vim vs sed awk and grep + interactive vs automation [was Re: Slice of life]

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> A few years ago, my situation was the exact inverse. After coming up
> to speed on shell scripts, the question was what next, sed? awk? My
> boss was of the opinion that Perl was a better solution.

I have no doubt that it _is_ the better solution, where the metric used
for "better" is "extends your capabilities to a greater degree before
running out of figurative steam (i.e., hitting limitations) in
addressing more-complex problems".  

Having used vi as my primary text editor for a very long time, and
grep/egrep as my search tool, I found (GNU) sed and awk to be very
natural extensions of the former two, respectively.  sed is just vi's
colon commands as a scripting tool.  awk is a simple regex tool, cousin
to grep's albeit with a somewhat different syntax.

Larry Wall was motivated in part by sed and awk's limitations to create
Perl in the first place.

I haven't been much bothered by those limitations yet, my main need
being just logfile analysis and managing a mere couple of thousand
Internet domains.  ;->

> I created a quick reference to Perl for my own use. If there is
> interest, I can share it.

Sure.  Please do.