For my part, I don't use awk for anything more complicated than one-liners. I used it for a while, stopped when I was working on something else, and forgot all

For my part, I don't use awk for anything more complicated than one-liners. I used it for a while, stopped when I was working on something else, and forgot all the awk-specific stuff. My MO these days is if it's anything more complicated than an awk one-liner like awk '{print $2 " " $NF}', I'll use Python or, lately, Ruby. (Perl would be fine, too, if I used it in other contexts often enough.) That said, there's nothing quite like, well, programming your environment. The extent to which you can manipulate files, directories, and text in *nix right out of the box makes me feel privileged to understand it. I can remember a time when renaming a bunch of images en masse seemed tantalizing but out of reach. I've since learned quite a bit, and even though it's relatively mundane now, it still feels magical. Upthread, someone called it "moving mountains." That's precisely it, and I love it. Yes, yes. I'm a complete and utter nerd, etc.