I was always scared of awk. Who needs to learn one more language just to do some basic string manipulation? Any “full-scale” language I already know would do the trick, won’t it? This line of thinking kept me from learning awk, but it’s hard to ignore a thing which is a part of POSIX and is so widely used everywhere. So, finally, I decided to give it a go. So far so good, awk is actually not that hard at all, and it does its job very well. It can do pretty much anything that grep and sed can, so using one thing instead of two other things can actually decrease the mental burden and simplify my workflow.

Here is a cool introduction to awk.