I use perl every day and awk almost every day. Awk is useful for commands where it forms a small part of an overall pipeline and needs to be somewhat terse, and

I use perl every day and awk almost every day. Awk is useful for commands where it forms a small part of an overall pipeline and needs to be somewhat terse, and yet fast. Gawk is actually fairly fast, mawk[1] even more so. [1]: http://invisible-island.net/mawk/mawk.html http://invisible-island.net/mawk/mawk.html