Grep, sed, awk

grep sed and awk are command line utilities designed in the mid-1970s. They are all designed to process text streams and descended from ed (the original Unix text editor).

• grep — find lines matching a pattern
• sed — transform a stream, line by line
• awk — arbitrary computation on structured text

awk is interesting because it’s essentially a self-contained programming language. It has variables, arithmetic, conditionals, loops, and more. For example, when awk sees amy,lawer,1000, it automatically splits it into $1=amy, $2=lawyer, $3=1000.

From there you could say $3 > 1000 { print $1 } and you've written a filter for people over 1000.

awk is still around but was extended by Perl in 1987. Python eventually replaced Perl for most people’s day to day use. But awk still finds niche use cases for writing tiny programs in the CLI without having to import dependencies or write python files.

I expect I will never use this.

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