[shp0ngle]

awk is fast and really useful.

It's also generally unreadable.

[coliveira]

I don't agree. Awk is very readable for people used to c-like languages like javascript. And it is much cleaner that Perl.

[gpderetta]

It is certainly more readable than sed for example.

[throwawayboise]

Yeah I use sed not infrequently but try to keep things simple. Anything more complicated than a "standard" sed one-liner (google it) I will start looking for something else.