From: Zachary Santer Subject: Re: The "asort" extension (Was: feature proposal: expand associative arrays in lexicographic order ...) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2026 01:19:55 -0400
>> Personally, I think we're getting close to the line between a shell >> and a programming language. If your shell script needs to extract the >> keys of an associative array in lexicographical order, then it might >> be the case that your shell script really ought to be redone in a more >> powerful programming language. >This script is all about running commands and filtering their output >through sed and awk. It makes sense as a bash script. If there's a >more powerful programming language that can do the equivalent of Whenever I see the phrase "sed and awk", I immediately think "No need for sed; whatever sed can do, AWK can do and do better". That said, I totally get the allure of writing in shell. Of course, it usually happens because somehow that simple 15 line shell script has grown to hundreds of lines and you don't want to go back and re-do it. And from what I can tell about your use-case, there's no need to do so. ================================================================================= Please do not send me replies to my posts on the list. I always read the replies via the web archive, so CC'ing to me is unnecessary. When responding to my posts, please try to refrain from giving bureaucratic answers. If you have nothing useful to say, then just click Next and go on. BTW, ain't interested in kludgey workarounds - got enough of my own! (YT id: 6H1lcubN0oE)
