There aren't any technical advantages, no. Perl's features are a proper superset of awk (by design!).
What's happened is that Kids Today (tm) never learned perl. So they're discovering awk as someone new to the idea of stream processing. And awk was a great idea for that, and it represented a genuine innovation worth emulating.
In the late 1970's. Then of course perl did emulate and surpass it. But then got forgotten. So kids are discovering awk instead. It's a little cringe, really.
Why is that cringe? They genuinely probably came across awk before perl (I know I did, I read "The AWK Programming Language" and then went on to "The C Programming Language").
Having that said, awk is great and it's been the same for decades and available on every system (the same can't really be said about perl).
In practice, on actual systems, you're likely to encounter nawk (the One True Awk), gawk (GNU Awk), mawk ("Mike's AWK", a fast awk), and Busybox's AWK.
There are other variants, yes, but in virtually every case these are fully POSIX compliant and/or have a POSIX mode.
(And in truth, gawk is the only non-fully-POSIX awk I've encountered --- it extends standard AWK with asort and the "'" formatting modifier (which prints localised htousands separators in numeric data).
Programmes written for any one awk, if using POSIX features only, will run on any awk.
Many small / embedded systems (think routers, stock Android, or any POSIX-only Unix variant) must have awk, but often don't include Perl.
You'll also find variants of Perl, though the relative stasis of that language make this less an issue now than in the '90s and aughts.
Awk is a useful language that you can learn in one afternoon, after reading the man page and a few examples. And then you can spend your whole life using it for several projects. You cannot do that with perl. That's why awk has a longer shelf life than perl.
> And then you can spend your whole life using it for several projects. You cannot do that with perl. That's why awk has a longer shelf life than perl.
A Perl developer would of course say you have this completely backwards and even if I haven't programmed Perl much, or even at all for the last decade I would tend to agree.
I'm one of those "kids these days" but did actually learn to program Perl at some point, and I generally prefer AWK. Perl is a large and complex language, I don't need it that often, and I'm not smart enough to keep remembering all of it.
Now, if I would get hired as a full-time Perl developer and spent 2 years developing Perl: it would perhaps be different. But that's not the case, and isn't for most people.
For better or worse, Perl sees a lot less usage than it once did; I rarely encounter it "in the wild" and don't even have it on my laptop because nothing needs it.
Perl came out in the late 80s and by the mid 2000's was really on its way out? I hired for my last perl position in around 2006.
Just saying, your definition of "kids today" could well include a decent portion of developers under 45 years old. Referring to this cohort repeatedly as "kids" is also a little cringe.
Did you really just reply to a comment that used the phrase "Kids Today (tm)" and try to interpret it as a genuine insult? The inability of this community to understand straightforward humor amazes me. Dude, it was a joke. And yes, I was calling mid-career professionals "kids". Deliberately. Because I'm old. And it's funny.
For simple uses cases, I find awk simpler than Perl. I love Perl, have written tens of thousands of lines, but on the CLI I prefer awk. I’m sorry I “cringe” you.
What's happened is that Kids Today (tm) never learned perl. So they're discovering awk as someone new to the idea of stream processing. And awk was a great idea for that, and it represented a genuine innovation worth emulating.
In the late 1970's. Then of course perl did emulate and surpass it. But then got forgotten. So kids are discovering awk instead. It's a little cringe, really.