I don't, and that's half the problem :-) If I did, I'd probably remember enough perl that I'd have never bit the bullet and learned awk! To answer the serious

I don't, and that's half the problem :-) If I did, I'd probably remember enough perl that I'd have never bit the bullet and learned awk! To answer the serious question, it's often enough for a first order solution to any problem where you have line and field separated text. Pulling instances of "something weird" out of log files, for instance, is a great use for awk, especially if the fingerprint of "something weird" is scattered through fields in a line in a way that makes grep cumbersome. Or if it spans a couple of lines, especially if you're dealing with a log from a multi-threaded app where there might be irrelevant lines interleaved with the ones you care about. I haven't written much production-grade awk, but I've often used it as a tool to understand a problem well enough to write a production-grade solution to a problem or fix bugs in application code.