Surprisingly relevant?

Posted May 20, 2020 18:49 UTC (Wed) by geert (subscriber, #98403)
In reply to: Surprisingly relevant? by Paf
Parent article: The state of the AWK

For small amounts of data, the tool usually doesn't matter at all.

A long time ago, a colleague came to me for help doing search and replace in a very large file. His editor of choice was "xedit", and the search and replace operation seemed to hang, or at least took ages. I opened his file in "vi", which performed the same operation in the blink of an eye. Didn't even have to refrain to sed.

Lesson learned: "xedit" was written as a sample program for showing how to use the X11 Athena Widgets, it was never meant to be a production-level editor.

Surprisingly relevant?

Posted May 20, 2020 20:19 UTC (Wed) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

In this context, we're talking about the fixed costs of setting up and tearing down O(1) extra processes (vs. setting up and tearing down exactly one awk process). A reasonable pipeline will scale to millions of lines of text very easily, because the per-process overhead just isn't that big compared to the actual work being done.

On the other hand, if you're doing a while read; do ...; done style thingy, then yes, it will be awful and slow. But I try to avoid that most of the time.