[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).