[just_myles]

Because syntatically as a language/tool it is super easy to remember. Writing one liners with awk feels more intuitive to me.

Awk example:

ls -l | awk '{print $9, $5}' or ls -lh | awk '{print $9, $5}'

Seems a whole lot simpler. To me. I find if you have to write exhaustive shell scripts then maybe you can look for something more verbose like Perl, I guess.

[shpeedy]

Yep, but you have bug in your awk one-liner.

[wahern]

If you mean the lack of quotations, then the behavior is well-defined and is presumably what was intended. Per POSIX,

> The print statement shall write the value of each expression argument onto the indicated output stream separated by the current output field separator (see variable OFS above), and terminated by the output record separator (see variable ORS above).

The default value for OFS is <space> and for ORS, <newline>.

[just_myles]

In my defense I did this fairly quickly (Which was the point.) and was not trying to illustrate proper syntax (I mean it does run and does produces an output.).

ls -l | awk '{print $9 "\t" $5}'

That is about as much as i'm willing to do for this.