Talk:Awk

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A comment [[User:Larry|Larry]] 13:52, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
: A reply [[User:Sally|Sally]] 09:47, 16 February 2025 (UTC)
:: Your reply ~~~~

Split page in two?

Talk status

This discussion is done.

i feel this page should be split in two: a generic page for 'awk' as an app-alternatives package, and a specific page for 'gawk' in particular. The page currently includes gawk-specific information (e.g. env vars) not necessarily applicable to other implementations.

This would also facilitate addressing the "broken man page" link.

-- Flexibeast (talk) 03:24, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

That's a good remark. To be honest, I don't know what would be best.

In general I think we are too spread-out, and if things can go concisely in one article it's easier to read, and for people to find things, and for us to maintain... Seems like a lot of work to document all four different implementations of awk available. I'd guess each implementation has it's own documentation, but I haven't checked.

I'm guessing that if one generic article can be written, that seems like it could be a balance of work, maintainability, and use to reader. But like I said, I don't have a true answer, so very open to other suggestions.

I've tried to make the article both more generic, and specify that it just uses gawk as an example. This was sort of a spur of the moment "fixup" to try to just make things more correct and to mention app-alternatives, I'm not saying with these edits that this is the direction things should be taken in ;).

Ris (talk) 06:35, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Good points. So just have one article, mostly generic but with implementation-specific details noted as required, and then have redirects from the several implementation names to this article? If so, that sounds fine to me.

-- Flexibeast (talk) 08:52, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

If it's doable like that, I think it helps us to not spread out too much. I'll close the discussion to keep the numbers of open discussions down - this doesn't mean not to add more comments if required ;). -- Ris (talk) 12:52, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Remove InfoBox entries for "Home" and "Official documentation"?

Talk status

This discussion is still ongoing as of 2025-02-04.

i'd like to remove the InfoBox entries for "Home" and "Official documentation", as GNU awk is not the official implementation of awk. (At least, not in the sense that groff can plausibly be argued to be the official continuation of nroff/troff, which itself is debatable.) If any implementation could potentially claim the mantle, i feel it might be The One True awk. But my suggestion is that we avoid these debates altogether, and simply remove the mentioned InfoBox entries. Leaving the two man page entries - for the POSIX page and the gawk page - seems reasonable to me, but to a certain extent, so does removing them ....

-- Flexibeast (talk) 09:05, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

Actually, as part of updating the tar page to note the existence of bsdtar and app-alternatives/tar, i've learnt of the existence of the 'text' parameter for the InfoBox odoc template. So i've done an edit - distinct from the rest of the updates so it can be easily reverted if necessary - that removes the 'homepage' InfoBox entry, uses custom text for 'odoc' entry for gtar, and adds a distinct 'odoc' entry for bsdtar. If this approach is acceptable, perhaps it could be done for the "awk" page?

-- Flexibeast (talk) 10:13, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

I understand your point and I'm sympathetic to it. But a concern I have with this is that if it doesn't go on the awk page, which page will it go on? I doubt we're going to maintain both a e.g. awk and GNU awk / gawk page, are we? But it's surely a useful source of information given most users would benefit from knowing the primary implementation homepage and so on. --Sam (talk) 01:32, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

Yeah, i'm not arguing for two pages - i accepted Ris' arguments about this in the discussion above. i guess i'd prefer to have links to the gawk documentation inline (which i'm happy to add) rather than in the InfoBox stack in a way that suggests that gawk is the official awk implementation.

-- Flexibeast (talk) 02:16, 7 February 2025 (UTC)