Awk: Power and Promise of a 40 yr old language (2021)
I wish Awk had capture groups.  It would fit in so well with typical Awk one-liners to be able to say:<p><pre><code>    awk '/foo=([0-9]+)/ { print $1 }'
</code></pre>
although I suppose the syntax would have to be different since $1 has a meaning already.<p>Yes, gawk has a function that returns capture groups, but it's a bit verbose for one-liners.  Instead I switch to Perl:<p><pre><code>    perl -nE 'if (/foo=([0-9]+)/) { say $1 }'
</code></pre>
But I wish I could just use Awk.