Interesting! I don't find awk too strange; indeed i strongly prefer it to Perl, which i wrote a lot of around the turn of the century. These days i reach for a

Interesting! I don't find awk too strange; indeed i strongly prefer it to Perl, which i wrote a lot of around the turn of the century. These days i reach for awk for a lot of log processing, particularly when it needs to be stateful. For example, i have a log file with entries for remote clients connecting and disconnecting. An awk script can loop over that and keep an array of clients, adding and removing them as appropriate, and be easily tweaked to report different things - emit an event for each connection-disconnection pair, or track the number of clients connected over time, etc. I couldn't do that at all with sed. It would be more awkward with bash. It would be easy enough, if a little bit more verbose, in Python.