You definitely want to work with it if you can. I live much of my life in python, but there hasn't never been a week, and usually not a day, in the last 10+ ye

You definitely want to work with it if you can. I live much of my life in python, but there hasn't never been a week, and usually not a day, in the last 10+ years where I don't write a quick awk snippet to do something useful to data. The advantage of awk over python is that it almost always takes < 60 seconds from the point at which you say, "I want to summarize, review, filters, report" on some columnar data to the point at which you have output in front of you. I"m fast with python doing that - but it's usually a 3-4 minute set of steps. The only exception being json, which awk is clumsy with. (jq is my goto tool for the simple queries, python for anything that requires more than a minute of thought.) Also - it's almost always the case that I'm using awk in conjunction with a bunch of other tools, cut/sed/uniq/grep to get what I want.