Probably because awk is available as a stock build of the approved OS. It's been around a long time. I mean, to be POSIX-compliant, you need an awk interpreter

Probably because awk is available as a stock build of the approved OS. It's been around a long time. I mean, to be POSIX-compliant, you need an awk interpreter in your system https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/awk.html https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/a...