> which is a waste of time when awk just does the right thing out of the box. Agree in general. Only exception I'd make to this is when you're selecting a rang

> which is a waste of time when awk just does the right thing out of the box. Agree in general. Only exception I'd make to this is when you're selecting a range of columns, as someone else mentioned elsewhere in the thread. I typically find (for example) `| sed -e 's/ \+/\t/g' | cut -f 1,3-10,14-17` to be both easier to type and easier to debug than typing out all the columns explicitly in an awk statement.