You still have to create the SQLite database and have the client handy. Awk is there by default in all *nix systems, and for these basic tasks it's incredibly e

You still have to create the SQLite database and have the client handy. Awk is there by default in all *nix systems, and for these basic tasks it's incredibly easy (see http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~dholland/computers/awk.html http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~dholland/computers/awk.html for a quick intro). Once you know it you can use it to process a lot of text files in the console without any kind of worry. Maybe it's a preprocess step before importing data to a database, maybe you're just exploring a dataset, maybe you want to modify some command's output in the middle of a pipe. I learned awk a few years ago and it does not have equivalent when the only thing you want to do is to consume column-based text and do some simple processing: it is simple and incredibly fast.