In cases where it's a one time use, anything that gets you an answer easily is great. Could be Groovy, Ruby, Python, Perl, etc. or of course these bin tools.

In cases where it's a one time use, anything that gets you an answer easily is great. Could be Groovy, Ruby, Python, Perl, etc. or of course these bin tools. But if it's going to be used a lot, and start-up time matters, then some of the full programming languages can become expensive for the temporary load they create just spinning up. In those cases, the standard Unix tools tend to be so much faster and lighter that it's worth learning them.