I mostly think of awk as a query language for text that's in record format. It doesn't seem to handle unformatted text very well and I tend to use sed or some o

I mostly think of awk as a query language for text that's in record format. It doesn't seem to handle unformatted text very well and I tend to use sed or some other kind of tool to clean it up before feeding it to awk. I like the baked in logic for dealing with record/field formatted data. One thing that seems to hang people up is the lack of a concatenation operator. You just put things next to each other. It looks a little weird. Having associative arrays is a nice plus-up from shell programming.