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Comment on Awk: The Power and Promise of a 40-Year-Old Language

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My first and only real use of awk was around 1995. I was working at a new job doing embedded software work at GE and we had a lot of documentation in SGML, written/viewed using Interleaf. Interleaf was super slow on the HP-UX workstations we had and iirc search was even slower. I got the idea to convert all the SGML files into a single HTML file and I reached for awk as I had used it for some one-liners previously. I ended up writing an awk script that generated a frameset with one sidebar frame that was a treeish table of contents and the other frame the mondo html file with anchors for the table of contents. It loaded pretty fast in the HP-UX browser and search was really fast.

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