that is not equivalent because awk will remove trailing/leading space/tab/newlines (newlines come into play with a different record separator) whereas, tr will

that is not equivalent because awk will remove trailing/leading space/tab/newlines (newlines come into play with a different record separator) whereas, tr will still leave a trailing/leading space for example: $ echo ' a b c ' | tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f2 a $ echo ' a b c ' | awk '{print $2}' b and by default awk splits on space/tab/newlines, whereas in cut example above, you get only space as delimiter cut has its uses and will be faster than awk, but it depends on the problem being solved