I thought your comment was going in a totally different direction, it’s nice to hear appreciation of improved teaching methods instead of the old “well I figured it out myself so everyone else should too”

Well, if you are comfortable with Python scripts, there’s not much reason to switch to awk. Unless perhaps you are equating awk to Python as scripting languages instead of CLI usage (like grep, sed, cut, etc) as my ebook focuses on. For example, if you have space separated columns of data, awk ‘{print $2}’ will give you just the second column (no need to write a script when a simple one-liner will do). This of course also allows you to integrate with shell features (like globs).

As a practical example, I use awk to filter and process particular entries from financial data (which is in csv format). Just a case of easily arriving at a solution in a single line of code (which I then save it for future use).

I’m not expert in sed or awk. I always have to Google. For me though, it’s generally that you can do a great deal in just one line of awk or sed. They’re standard on any Linux distribution I’ve ever used. When building out pipelines, scripts that you want run from an installer you built post install and when removing, sed and awk rather than needing python.

All really nice when you have strict configuration management and versioning and there’s something deployed but it doesn’t have the python packages installed that would make it easy in python and you can’t just pip install it on hundreds+ of computers without going through a process of approval and building a new tagged version release but sed/awk/etc can do the job. If it’s hard enough, python and whatever packages you can install. If simple enough to do in a small bash script, no python just what’s standard in your Linux distro

I manage some servers and awk can be useful to filter data. If you use commands like grep, and use the pipe operator (the " | " command), awk can be very handy.

Sure, a Python script can do that as well, but doing a one-liner in Bash is waaay faster to program.

Is it more for situations that need to be compatible with most *nix systems and you might not necessarily have access to a higher level scripting language?

Yes, and also because integrating Python one-liners into shell pipelines is awkward in general. I’m more likely to write my entire script in Python than to use it just for text processing, and a lot of the time that’s just a pain. Python isn’t really designed for one-liners or for use as a shell. You can twist it into working in those use cases, but then I’d ask the reverse question: why would you do that when you could “just” use awk?

On macOS, Python is not installed by default. So if you are writing scripts that you want to be portable across platforms, or for general Mac administration, using Python is a burden.

This is also true when working with some embedded devices. IIRC I can ssh into my router and use awk (thanks to it being included in Busybox), but I’m definitely not going to install an entire Python environment there. I’m not sure there’d even be enough storage space for that.

You misstyped fish.