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Life & fun · February 28, 2022

Prig – like AWK, but uses Go for “scripting”

Describes Prig, which is for Processing Records In Go. It's a text processing tool like AWK, but it uses Go as the scripting language.

Prig – like AWK, but uses Go for “scripting” launched on February 28, 2022 with 77 votes, #585 of 2,645 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 4 years on.

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In plain words

Prig is a command-line text processing tool inspired by AWK that uses Go as its scripting language instead of AWK's traditional syntax. It allows users to write data processing scripts in Go, combining AWK's line-by-line processing model with Go's capabilities. The tool is designed for developers who prefer Go over AWK for text manipulation and data extraction tasks.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

Summary: The article describes Prig, my AWK-like tool that uses Go as the scripting language. I compare Prig with AWK, then dive into how Prig works, and finally look briefly at Prig’s Sort and SortMap builtins (which use Go’s new generics if Go 1.18 is available). In a recent Hacker News comment I learned about rp , a little text processing tool by Charles Blake that is kind of like AWK, but uses Nim as the scripting language. The works because the Nim compiler is fast and the Nim language is terse, so you can use it for one-off scripts. Go has one of those two things going for it: fast build times. It’s not exactly terse, which makes it less than ideal for one-liner scripts. On the other…from benhoyt.com

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