Tell me what you think of sed and awk

[Nate]

On the Jax.PM jacksonville-pm-list;
Nate <catenate at yahoo.com> wrote -


Here's something I can't figure out, I need the opinions of you
Perl/Unix gurus.

I live for O'Reilly books, so a while back I got the "Unix CD
Bookshelf" to get the hyperlinked version of "Unix Power Tools."

I started reading the book included with it, "sed and awk" and I can't
help but think that I can do all this with Perl. Sometimes it might
make more sense to use sed and/or awk for quick one liners, but is it
worth the trouble to learn? sed and awk were what people relied on
before Perl came along, and those same people still rely on sed and awk
because they are familiar with them, but should new users learn them?

Should I spend the time I would spend getting familiar with sed and awk
to learn more Perl modules, or would learning sed and awk help make me
a better rounded Perl hacker and Linux user.

I always have sed and awk available, since I run Linux at home and I
install cygwin on my NT boxes at work, so I wouldn't only have it on
one platform.

I'm not planning on spending much time on sed & awk, this is more of a
philosophical question.

What is the take of you gurus on the list? How worthwhile is the
sed/awk combo these days? Do you still use them regularly? What would
you recommend to a beginner?

Thanks for putting up with my questions again :)


=====
nate    catenate at yahoo.com
my infosec favorites -> www.geocities.com/catenate/
_____________________________________________________
People understand instinctively that the best way for computer programs to communicate with each other is for each of them to be strict in what they emit, and liberal in what they accept. The odd thing is that people themselves are not willing to be strict in how they speak, and liberal in how they listen. 
  --Larry Wall, 2nd State of the Onion Address, August 1998
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