Perl is a replacement for awk and sed and can do everything they can, and much, much more.
Yes, but sometimes the older tools are better fits for the problem at hand. Some time ago I suggested to another questioner to either use sed in his shell script or rewrite the entire script in Perl because sed could do the work in less time than Perl needs for startup/shutdown overhead. Perl is more flexible and powerful, but that power does come at a cost and this question happens to fit Awk's domain almost exactly.
Awk's greatest strength and greatest limitation is the implicit outer loop. On one hand, that feature allows Awk programs to be very efficient, but on the other hand, it limits Awk to processing input text streams.
(though this isn't AwkMonks)
I firmly believe that every Perl programmer should learn Awk because learning Awk will make you a better Perl programmer.
In reply to Re^5: Split tab-separated file into separate files, based on column name (open on demand)
by jcb
in thread Split tab-separated file into separate files, based on column name
by Anonymous Monk
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