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Idiomatic awk
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I've reached for some complex awk when I am looking to parse snippets of code where breaking out a full language parser would have been too much.
One example is parsing statements from a Dockerfile but only within certain stages of the image. So I reach for regex range in awk and I can make something that works everywhere.
Of course I probably could have done the same thing in python by controlling the beginning and end via variables, but I like awk sometimes.