I am surprised to see the a2p utility installed by default in my Linux distribution.a2p is a command line utility that converts an Awk program from standard input to a perl program that it outputs to standard output.Why would I ever want to convert an Awk program to a Perl program when I have an Awk interpreter installed?Why is it that Linux distributions include a2p in their default installations?
Why is a2p (Awk to Perl translator) installed by default? Why would I want to convert Awk to Perl?
command line;awk;perl;command
You might want to use these tools to increase the efficiency of perl scripts.You would want to do this if you had a larger perl program and you wanted to integrate the functionality of an awk script without calling a subprocess.  You would call a2p and integrate the generated code into an existing perl script.There's a similar utility, find2perl which takes a find command line and generates perl code to do the same thing, avoiding the call to a find subprocess.These are optimization tools for perl scripts.