[leovonl]

Sorry, but I strongly disagree.

I can think of two very strong reasons to prefer awk over perl:

* busybox implements awk, so its (usually) available even on embedded platforms

* awk syntax is way clearer than perl, anyone that has a few experience in C + shell can figure out what is being done with some googling

awk is also powerful enough to separate output to different files, accumulate inputs, etc. And if you need anything more complex, there are tons of other languages to choose from then (including perl).