awk is certainly a really important tool to know, but in general this is poor advice. awk is significantly slower than grep -E, and typing awk commands is often

awk is certainly a really important tool to know, but in general this is poor advice. awk is significantly slower than grep -E, and typing awk commands is often much slower as well. Not to mention that awk only operates on a single stream of data, and can't do operations with file awareness. Sure, use awk's line filtering when you're already going to need awk for something else, but in general your first instinct should be grep.