<div><span class="gmail_quote">On 13/06/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">nic</b> <<a href="mailto:nic@tymar.com">nic@tymar.com</a>> wrote:</span>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">Do you have some specific application where you feel detailed knowledge of awk and sed is<br>necessary?</blockquote>
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<div>The one area which i would use sed or awk would be in the case of a server install, i take the approach of only installing software that is needed for the server to operate, so scripting languages would fall into a question mark category for installation....
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<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">At risk of starting a flame war, I'd suggest that the time for needing a lot of detailed<br>knowledge of things like awk and sed has passed, and that if you need to do anything
<br>remotely complex, then it's almost certainly easier and quicker to do in Python. I don't<br>know enough to say whether Ruby is good for the scripting area, but if so, then that could<br>be a contender too.</blockquote>
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<div>The other reason that i wanted to learn sed and awk is because i wanted to get into some serious shell scripting. I was under the impression that for shell scripting, sed, awk and regular expressions were 'need to knows' for a shell script writing. But perhaps a basic understanding of sed and awk is all that is needed, and the use of perl or python would be better for the more complex processing?
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<div>Anthony</div></div>