Michael Lazin wrote: > I think removing awk is a bad idea. It will break legacy scripts as > has already been suggested. I am mostly an observer on this list and > say very little but I think that awk is used by a lot of people. I > used it in a script that analyzed mail logs for example. It was > previously written in perl but I redid it in bash with awk and it ran > faster.
Nobody in this thread is proposing removing awk from the default-installed set of packages in Debian. Removing "Essential: yes" from it would mean that some small and very deliberately constructed system images would do without it. A default or even minimal Debian install via d-i or debootstrap or mmdebstrap *would* include awk, and your script would continue to run just fine. If you ever had a system without awk, it would be because you removed awk, or deliberately constructed a system that omitted it.
