Awk seems to have fallen out of favor, in my opinion, due to the rising popularity of easier to use general purpose programming/scripting languages. Awk is the

Awk seems to have fallen out of favor, in my opinion, due to the rising popularity of easier to use general purpose programming/scripting languages. Awk is the bee's knees when it comes to processing text. You can do just about anything to some text with it. However, you can do much the same with Perl or Python, both of which can do more than just process text. I still use awk for shell one-liners. It can do the work of grep, grep -v, cut, and substring operations in one command, which makes things a bit simpler (less processes, less pipes). Unfortunately, a grep piped to cut is almost always faster due to awk being a very robust interpreter.