When do I use perl, awk, sed, grep, cut etc.. Was[OT] get all devices from a vendor from pci.ids

[Floris <jkfloris@dds.nl>]

> > So every Debian user has the perl command?
> Not only Debian users, the vast majority of linux / unix users have
> perl installed (maybe now that android is here, this statement is not
> true any more ...
>
> With awk:
> awk -v vendor=0e11 'p == 1 && /^[^[:space:]]/ { p=0; } $0 ~ "^"vendor"
> " {p=1;} p' /usr/share/misc/pci.ids
>
> With sed:
> sed -ne '/^0e11/p' -e '/^0e11/,/^[^[:space:]]/ { /^[^[:space:]]/d ; p
> }'  /usr/share/misc/pci.ids
>
> Wrapping to script which get an argument is easy
>
> Regards

Thanks for your answer, and the next question pops in.

Is there a "rule" when I use perl, awk, sed, grep, cut etc. in a script?
Often I find multiple solutions on the Internet to achieve the same output.

A simple example:

cut -d: -f2
or
awk -F: '{ print $2 }'

Is the one better as the other (CPU/RAM usage), or is it just "taste"

Floris