>OK, so as kazinator has pointed out, awk is now a mandatory part of Posix, and so is genuinely a part of "shell".

Interesting. This gets steadily murkier. So, just because kazinator pointed it out, you now changed your mind, and awk is now 'genuinely part of "shell"'?

Could you not have checked this first yourself, before your reply to my original comment, where I said that I wrote Python and shell solutions, and you disputed that my shell solution was a shell solution (it was an awk one, in your opinion)? It also means that you did not know that "awk was part of shell" despite your claimed "four decades" in the field, and your claiming to have read "most of the classics"!

Not saying those two points are not true, but what have you learned from those, if you don't know the difference between a shell script and an awk script [1]? Hmmm ...

>So it's shell.

In fact, BTW, even though kazinator may have said that, quoting from a POSIX spec, in a pragmatic sense, for those of us who care about getting work done, shell and awk are still different things, and awk is not a "part of shell", at least, if by "shell" is meant the Unix command-line interpreter and script runner, like sh or ksh or bash or similar. If meant in a broader sense, as in the whole command-line Unix environment, then yes, awk could be, I suppose, loosely be considered as part of shell, although I think it makes more sense to call awk part of Unix, or Unix userland.

And finally, you have now come around 180 degrees, and are now saying what I said: "it's shell", although I did not use those exact words.

Also, I noticed what gerbilly said in reply to you, here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19280634

>This is just pedantry.

>I this read you other replies and I can't see them adding much value to the discussion.

>You are just being rigid about semantics.

>What action are we supposed to take having read your comments?

>To be careful of not calling a pipeline with awk in it 'shell?'

>To be ashamed of using awk because it's a programming language, and that is 'cheating'?

I noticed that you did not reply to gerbilly, just as you did not reply to at least one of my challenges of your earlier claims., and you raised some other points, instead. Seems like moving goalposts, to me.

And I think he/she is right, both in general, based on all your comments so far, that were in reply to my top-level comment, and also because of this last bit above from you, in your comment that I am replying to:

>So it's shell. I might, however, given my background, and remembering as I do its first introduction, always have trouble thinking of it as such.

So this is like you are saying that you acknowledge it is shell, even mentioned in the POSIX standard, but still have trouble internalizing that.

Who cares about what you have trouble remembering or thinking of it as, versus what the facts on the ground are? (You said that redundantly in a couple of places, too, in this thread). It only seems to confirm the rigidity that gerbilly surmised.

[1] There is still a fundamental flaw in one of your comments, about my shell solution, that I noticed. Pointing that out will have to wait until tomorrow, since I said earlier that I may be busy, and am.