One of the activities proposals was to try different tools each week and review them. So, let's do this.

There are good tools we can review, for example the ones listed on the kmandla's list and on the one thing well list.
Freem gave the idea on IRC for the first tools we review to be programs created by one of us. We have good developers among us, and good software as well.

What do you think? Which tool can we review first?

I made a wiki page here.

We can start with some of pranomostro's mini-tools:

• skip — skip text between two strings
  
• uu — unsorted uniq that does not lock up your pipeline
  

skip is a simple but handy tool.
I realized I have implemented skip a bunch of times when parsing stuff with awk. For example, tbgen, my verilog testbench generator, has to skip over C-style comments when parsing verilog.

I extracted the skipping code from tbgen and wrote an awk version of pranomostro's skip: here it is

As a bonus for using awk, regular expressions just work.

skip is pretty useful, it can help do things that would be complicated with sed, awk, or cut. However, as phillbush has shown, it's still relatively easy to implement.

It remains to be seen if I'll remember this tool even exists the next time I have to do a tasks that requires removing text within two strings.