Indeed I did try mawk and found it to be faster. However, when I try setting locale "LC_ALL=C"; the performance of both awk and mawk were almost the same. I als

Indeed I did try mawk and found it to be faster. However, when I try setting locale "LC_ALL=C"; the performance of both awk and mawk were almost the same. I also let it at awk in favor of portability -- mawk is not available on most systems and needs to be installed.