Yeah grep will generally be faster than awk for finding patterns in files, since that's the only thing it does, and it can (and does) take advantage of those co

Yeah grep will generally be faster than awk for finding patterns in files, since that's the only thing it does, and it can (and does) take advantage of those constraints to apply performance optimizations. Personally I don't think either approach is "better". Sometimes it's easier to deal with some complex logic if it's all in a single awk program, rather than smeared across combinations of grep, awk, and other things. If that outweighs the perf drop in some specific situation, then I'll do it.