awkserver

> It has only enough functionality to provide text matching and substitution. Gawk at least can do a lot more than that. Reading and writing files, network communications, and run arbitrary shell commands, for example. It's certainly not as powerful as perl but it's also not limited to just text matching and substitution. Edit: figured I would provide some examples. Here's an http server and a first person shooter in gawk. Maybe not so practical but they show some of gawk's capabilities. https://github.com/kevin-albert/awkserver https://github.com/TheMozg/awk-raycaster

AWK's primary use case is processing a file line by line. It offers a few well thought out mechanisms to do so, allowing you to script relatively complex operations in just a few lines. At the same time, and acknowledging it's not pretty, it's powerful enough to run an http server (not kidding: https://github.com/kevin-albert/awkserver). So if you want/need to write a script that requires more sophistication than cat, join and sort offer, but you don't want the hassle of setting up IO, field splitting, pattern matching in a more complex programming language, etc., AWK is your friend. Some of examples of my own awk scripts: converting csv to json, counting trigrams, splitting text by words or sentences, getting the one line from a complex and long log file that I needed, pre-processing files before compilation, cross-tabulation, rewriting