[torcete]

I use awk constantly in bioinformatics, for many of the file formats designed to store genomic data, awk is the easiest tool you can use for processing.

[jhbadger]

There's even a version of awk specifically designed for bioinformatics that natively knows how to handle fasta, fastq, and sam files, among other formats.

https://github.com/lh3/bioawk

[unemphysbro]

I did the exact same thing!

quickly looking at averages/errors, a simple awk one-liner will do.