I think I discovered mawk a few weeks ago from a lobsters comment. I’ve been using it very successfully to parse big (10GB+) structured text files for the past week. It is very fast, and the awk language is really easy to learn. I used to turn to Ruby for these quick data munging scripts but I’m finding that I use it less and less.
One thing to note is that mawk has a few subtle differences from awk. They’re detailed very well in the manpage, and I think the cases tend to be pretty rare, but it’s not a 100% drop in replacement.
I think I discovered mawk a few weeks ago from a lobsters comment. I’ve been using it very successfully to parse big (10GB+) structured text files for the past week. It is very fast, and the awk language is really easy to learn. I used to turn to Ruby for these quick data munging scripts but I’m finding that I use it less and less.
One thing to note is that mawk has a few subtle differences from awk. They’re detailed very well in the manpage, and I think the cases tend to be pretty rare, but it’s not a 100% drop in replacement.