On Wed, 26 May 2010, Bastien Nocera wrote:
Not very long multiplied by cold caches, and memory allocations and
frees, etc. The problem isn't that awk is launched, is that it's
launched a 100 times along with grep, cut, whatever kind of sticks and
strings you can get in shell text processing.
Quite often this is simply bad use of tools. Often large parts of the
shell script around the AWK use could have been easily done /within/
the AWK script. Indeed, I'm sure have seen boot systems that were
done as AWK scripts. ;)
AWK is a relatively capable line/string/stream processing programming
language, it's quite sad so many don't realise this and only use it
to print fields by number.
regards,
--
Paul Jakma paul(a)jakma.org Key ID: 64A2FF6A
Fortune:
In every non-trivial program there is at least one bug.