I had the same question the other day, and it turned into a spontaneous all-company "why you should use awk" lesson. If this kind of thing sounds cool to you,

I had the same question the other day, and it turned into a spontaneous all-company "why you should use awk" lesson. If this kind of thing sounds cool to you, drop me a resume at david at loggly.com. We're at 1st and Mission in SF. Short answer, it's a baby programming language that's more powerful than sed, quicker to write than python, and less confusing than cut.