combine two command without pipe (awk and sed)

Question

I have a command that uses an awk and a sed.

awk '{1ドル=""; print 0ドル}' file.txt | sed "1s/.*/D,,3/" #awk command removes first column from file.txt and prints the rest, sed inserts "D,,3" on the first line

I am getting the desired result for the command above. However, I am trying to avoid using pipes, is there a way to combine the two commands above and get the same result without using a pipe.

first : awk '{1ドル=""; print 0ドル}' file.txt
second: sed "1s/.*/D,,3/"
file.txt:
row 3:
name john doe
state Florida
age 32

• steeldriver: Why do you need sed at all? there are many ways to modify the first line only in awk e.g. awk 'NR==1 {print "D,,3"; next} {1ドル=""; print 0ドル}'
• venka99: I used sed to insert D,,3 on the first line. I tried you command and it worked the same. What does NR==1 and next do?
• user14755: What's wrong with pipes?
• venka99: I was told that each command in a long pipe adds runtime compare to a single command without a pipe.
• dhag: A single command that does two things to a stream may well be slower than two separate piped commands, because those will run concurrently.

Answer 1

Awk and sed are both Turing-complete, so whatever one can do, the other can also do. (In terms of text transformation, that is; awk has more OS interaction facilities.) However, each has their own strengths and weaknesses. Awk can easily do most of what sed can do but a few things such as regex replacements with groups are more difficult. Sed can theoretically do anything awk can do but with considerable difficulty (e.g. sed doesn't have integer arithmetic so you'd have to code it up with text transformations). So if you want to put everything in a single command, awk is usually your best bet.

awk 'NR==1 {print "D,,3"; next} {1ドル=""; print 0ドル}' file.txt

Here, sed can also easily do what you're doing with awk: normalize whitespace and cut everything up to the first space.

sed "s/[ \t][ \t]*/ /g; s/^ *[^ ][^ ]*/ /; s/^ $//; 1s/.*/D,,3/" file.txt

Combining the two commands isn't particularly useful here. I don't anticipate a performance gain. There is a performance penalty for every pipe, since the data has to flow from one command to the next. However, there can also be performance gains. If you have multiple CPUs then the two commands can execute in parallel. If a more specialized command is used for certain things (e.g. using special-purpose tools like grep and head instead of a general-purpose tool like awk) then that more specialized command is usually faster. Whether the gains compensate the overhead of the pipe depends on the data, on the tools, on how many cores you have, etc.

Unless this script is a performance bottleneck, think of clarity first. In this case, I would avoid the pure sed version — it may be slightly faster, but it's a lot less readable. (It could perhaps be simplified under certain assumptions about your data, e.g. if you know that there will always be at least two fields and that the field separator is always a single space or you don't care to preserve the amount of whitespace.) I find it clearer to do everything in awk, but it it's a near draw between that and your awk+sed version.