I forget where I saw it now, but I've seen a pretty good write up on using unix tool to do very common operations -- set counting, histograms, etc -- and awk is

I forget where I saw it now, but I've seen a pretty good write up on using unix tool to do very common operations -- set counting, histograms, etc -- and awk is at the heart of most of them. Usually with sort and uniq -c in there. It's amazing how quickly you can pick apart a log file -- minutes -- while it might take others hours to get to the same information using Excel.