6.2. How does sed compare with awk, perl, and other utilities?

Awk is a much richer language with many features of a programming language, including variable names, math functions, arrays, system calls, etc. Its command structure is similar to sed:

      address { command(s) }

which means that for each line or range of lines that matches the address, execute the command(s). In both sed and awk, an address can be a line number or a RE somewhere on the line, or both.

In program size, awk is 3-10 times larger than sed. Awk has most of the functions of sed, but not all. Notably, sed supports backreferences (\1, \2, ...) to previous expressions, and awk does not have any comparable syntax. (One exception: GNU awk v3.0 introduced gensub(), which supports backreferences only on substitutions.)

Perl is a general-purpose programming language, with many features beyond text processing and interprocess communication, taking it well past awk or other scripting languages. Perl supports every feature sed does and has its own set of extended regular expressions, which give it extensive power in pattern matching and processing. (Note: the standard perl distribution comes with 's2p', a sed-to-perl conversion script. See section 3.6 for more info.) Like sed and awk, perl scripts do not need to be compiled into binary code. Like sed, perl can also run many useful "one-liners" from the command line, though with greater flexibility; see question 4.41 ("How do I make substitutions in every file in a directory, or in a complete directory tree?").

On the other hand, the current version of perl is from 8 to 35 times larger than sed in its executables alone (perl's library modules and allied files not included!). Further, for most simple tasks such as substitution, sed executes more quickly than either perl or awk. All these utilities serve to process input text, transforming it to meet our needs . . . or our arbitrary whims.