[vidarh]

> What are the practical applications of knowing AWK over knowing JS?

That it is present on pretty much every Unix-like system, and most other platforms with a "real" OS, including platforms where finding a modern Javascript implementation is impossible.

It's also a very small language, and the default of parsing records from standard in and splitting them by a field separator and pattern matching on them makes it very well suited for compact filters without extra seremony (some other interpreters have flags to give an awk-like exerience - e.g. Ruby (MRI) - but none are remotely as likely to be installed everywhere unless you go for more cryptic tools like sed).