[joepvd]

awk is a really productive constraint one can oblige to. If a problem looks like a text processing problem, use awk, and let the idioms set in. It is an awesome tool to have on one's belt.

It is, in a sense, liberating to not have any library support for common problems: No need to learn a library (hej!) and, by the way, what you need in any given problem is an easy subset of what that library would do anyway.

Awk has made me focus more on the data there is to analyze, rather than the framework to analyze it with.

As the idiomatic use of awk is also very succinct, I hardly can imagine working efficiently on the command line without it.

[kbenson]

I take a different stance. I never use awk, because I can use Perl. In using Perl, I also have access to the many modules that can extend it's usefulness. One of the core reasons Perl was created was to fill in where awk wasn't as useful as it could be.

[drauh]

I use awk only if it's a trivial one-liner. The only awk I can remember is selecting specific columns in whitespace-separated text. If it's just a single column, I'll try to use cut(1).

For anything more complicated, I'll use Python. Because if it's something that is going to have a somewhat long life, and that I would need to feed into plotting, I'd rather use Python. Because I remember the bad old days of plot(1).

[doublec]

This is a similar argument used by users of languages like J, K and APL. The language is small and concise - rather than learn libraries or frameworks you use the primitives and the emphasis is on the data being manipulated. Common patterns (like +/%# for average) are recognized rather than named.