Talk:Awk

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Split page in two?

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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)