depends upon the usecase, for relatively simple column filtering, substitution, etc, awk script would be briefer than python equivalent and most likely be faste

depends upon the usecase, for relatively simple column filtering, substitution, etc, awk script would be briefer than python equivalent and most likely be faster as well if it becomes lengthy (and again depends on features required), then Python is likely to have inbuilt/3rd-party libraries to make it easier to write and maintain if it is a question of constructing command line one-liners and using it as a part of other cli tools, then awk wins easily for example: awk -F'\\W+' -v OFS=, '{print $NF, $2}' input.txt prints last column and second column, where non-word characters form the field separator and comma is used as output field separator