Most complaints that awk doesn't have have this or that feature ignore the fact that awk is not supposed to be used in isolation. Any substantial use of awk has

Most complaints that awk doesn't have have this or that feature ignore the fact that awk is not supposed to be used in isolation. Any substantial use of awk has to be tied to other UNIX utilities. I don't think you can, or should, write a medium to large size script completely in awk, the whole idea is to compose it with one or more UNIX commands.