I don't think true python "one liners" are a thing, but the awkward thing about awk is sits in this place where what you are doing is complicated enough you need awk, but simple enough you need a one liner? Those cases have been exceedingly few and far between for me enough that every time I want to reach for awk I have to go lookup how to do anything more complex than printing fields. That completely defeats the point of the quick one liner.

May as well open up vim, write my 7 lines of python, and run it. Because I use it everyday and didn't have to look anything up it ends up far faster. Then when I am done I either delete it, throw it in a scripts directory, or make it part of some existing infrastructure repo. Now if I keep it because I used python it is much more readable than the awk 1 liner would have been.

I have tried in earnest to memorize awk's idiosyncrasies multiple times now. By the time I go to use what I learned the last time it is months later and I have forgot enough I need to go look stuff up.

So in a way, here I am: The guy that writes "one liners" in python.

perl actually has a one-liner way of invocation that's modeled after awk.

For example, to print the first field of a line work the default delimiter could be accomplished in perl by running:

    perl -ane 'print $F[0], "\n"'

Where $F[0] is the equivalent of $1 in awk.