[ccalloway]

Did you read or understand my original comment?

I specifically named awk as a way of solving these type of problems that has a similar applicability and maturity to a scripting language. My real objection is to long chains of cut, head, cat, grep, and so on. I also think that utilities like jq and xargs, which were invented exactly to allow people to do things in shell one-liners which are trivial in a proper language, are worse than useless.

I didn't say that no one should use awk, or no one should use the command line.

In fact I didn't say that no one should use pipes with head, cut and grep either. I just said that most reasons to use them were no longer valid.