I use awk a lot myself. It's gotten to the point where I enjoy using it, might be a disease of some sort. But it's still been highly productive for parsing tex

I use awk a lot myself. It's gotten to the point where I enjoy using it, might be a disease of some sort. But it's still been highly productive for parsing text streams or do stuff like add proper visual feedback to plaintext tools, pretty progress bars for wget/curl download jobs, monitoring scripts and generally anything related to extracting bits of data or pretty-printing. I particularly enjoy using gawk (mostly for the more usable match() and sed-like in-file editing), but will do fine with a busybox awk or so as well. Something about the language just clicks with my way of doing things. It's like the perfect middle-ground between a shell script and starting a full python (or equivalent) script.