[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).