Yep awk is lovely and well worth the time to learn. This is probably not important for embedded but doesn’t a pipeline of small scripts (which could be in awk)

Yep awk is lovely and well worth the time to learn. This is probably not important for embedded but doesn’t a pipeline of small scripts (which could be in awk) give you better threading support? Xargs, GNU parallel or even make then scale that out really quickly.