[cturner]

Have found static builds of awk useful in low-dependency work. I bundled it with a windows installer to do some wrangling we needed at install time. Another time I was sending packages to a unix cluster, but did not have access myself. Used awk as part of the bootstrap for the package.

I used to write event-driven scripts off it - each line is a message, interpreted by awk. Something I was not able to get working with any of the awks I tried was where you append messages to the file as you are consuming it (this is kind of like code generation). I ended up doing this in python (https://github.com/cratuki/interface_script_py).