I don't know any other tool that is so simple and can be learned so quickly and yet is so powerful. I use it daily. The handful of minutes it took to learn ha

I don't know any other tool that is so simple and can be learned so quickly and yet is so powerful. I use it daily. The handful of minutes it took to learn have repaid that investment thousands of times over. Yes, there will be better solutions for individual cases. But awk is always installed, always available, and for anybody quickly querying semi-structured text data on the Unix command line it is a godsend.