Modern BSDs, macOS, and Solaris certainly have Perl and Python. (iOS and Android don't, but they don't have awk either.) What other Unixes are you thinking of? AIX, HP/UX, IRIX, UnixWare, etc. should be considered retrocomputing at this point and not relevant to modern compatibility discussions.

Linux distros based on busybox, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, are a more compelling reason for considering awk than considerations involving other Unixes.

> The world of UNIX and UNIX-likes is larger than just Linux distributions

The post I was replying to specifically said Linux distros.

I don't think I ever ran TinyCore without immediately connecting it to the Internet to grab a bunch of packages. Puppy Linux included Perl in its base install at one time (I don't know if it still does), and Damn Small Linux was supposed to have a cut-down version of Perl included as well.

If you’re using DamnSmallLinux etc I’d imagine you can package your own awk quite easily! Perl would require a lot more packages. But all you need to do is copy a couple binaries right?

Building a Docker image gives basically full freedom over the choice of a runtime. If your Dockerized application is written in Java or Python or PHP or C#, why not just write the tooling and scripts in the same language too? Or at least install a suitable runtime just for the scripts? Or if starting from an empty container, why not build the script into a statically-linked binary to be placed next to the application?

I don't think true python "one liners" are a thing, but the awkward thing about awk is sits in this place where what you are doing is complicated enough you need awk, but simple enough you need a one liner? Those cases have been exceedingly few and far between for me enough that every time I want to reach for awk I have to go lookup how to do anything more complex than printing fields. That completely defeats the point of the quick one liner.

May as well open up vim, write my 7 lines of python, and run it. Because I use it everyday and didn't have to look anything up it ends up far faster. Then when I am done I either delete it, throw it in a scripts directory, or make it part of some existing infrastructure repo. Now if I keep it because I used python it is much more readable than the awk 1 liner would have been.

I have tried in earnest to memorize awk's idiosyncrasies multiple times now. By the time I go to use what I learned the last time it is months later and I have forgot enough I need to go look stuff up.

So in a way, here I am: The guy that writes "one liners" in python.

perl actually has a one-liner way of invocation that's modeled after awk.

For example, to print the first field of a line work the default delimiter could be accomplished in perl by running:

    perl -ane 'print $F[0], "\n"'

Where $F[0] is the equivalent of $1 in awk.