[sketerpot]

It's very handy when you're working with delimiter-separated data. I've never bothered to learn the more powerful features of awk, because Python is generally better for sufficiently complicated text processing, but for little one-off scripts, awk is a nice thing to know.

[silentbicycle]

Right. Awk is great for the sweet spot of 1-3 line filters, and the subset of the language needed for most of those could fit on half a page. You could do bigger stuff with it, but at that point it's probably better done in another language. There are surprisingly many cases where a few lines of awk is good enough, though.

Perl is logically a superset of awk, but there's so much more in the core language that I kept forgetting parts of it.