I'll tend to do this in scripts, both for clarity and precision (i.e. when I know the specific, single delimiter). However, for ad-hoc command-line usage, I st

I'll tend to do this in scripts, both for clarity and precision (i.e. when I know the specific, single delimiter). However, for ad-hoc command-line usage, I still prefer awk, because (1) the default delimiter is white space, which means I don't have to worry about if what I'm looking at might contain tabs intermingled with spaces (or how many spaces) and (2) it makes it much easier to incrementally increase the complexity of my ad-hoc operation, such as if I decide I want to take a sum or average of one of those columns, after all.