[CarolineW]

That I did not know - thank you. We here still think of awk as fundamentally different from other pipeline facilities such as tr, sed, sort, uniq, and so on, but I can see why it could, perhaps should, be though of as being "shell".

I guess I was triggered by the fact that the proposed shell solution is:

* not on a command line (although it could be),

* is significantly longer than the original command line solution, and

* gives a different result.

But you're right, it's shell. I might, however, given my background, and remembering as I do its first introduction, always have trouble thinking of it as such.

[majewsky]

> We here still think of awk as fundamentally different from other pipeline facilities such as [...] sed

If you consider awk "not-shell" because it's an entire language, then it's really inconsistent to consider sed "shell". sed is a stream programming language. For example, this is a Sudoku solver written in sed: http://sed.sourceforge.net/local/games/sedoku.sed.html

[CarolineW]

Actually, we are pretty marginal on sed, but point taken. It feels like there's a difference between "stream mode" and "program mode".

I remember when awk was first implemented. sed was already standard, and awk was this new thing. I love it, and for some things it's my "go to" language. That colors how I think of it - I think of it as a language.

But this has been done to death, everyone is jumping on me, so there seems little to add.

[lapnitnelav]

I can pull off some ok stuff with the shell toolkit, including awk and sed but that's a whole different level.

Whoever authored that, mad props.