My story about learning the power of awk was I was working on a dataset and had written a page or so Worth's of Perl... and kept bungling it. I emailed the scie

My story about learning the power of awk was I was working on a dataset and had written a page or so Worth's of Perl... and kept bungling it. I emailed the scientist who wrote the paper whose technique I was emulating and he said, why not use awk, and gave me a basic example one liner, with a bit of modification it worked! Of course all that really means is I suck at Perl, but it was an eye opener for how powerful awk is.