I don’t think you’re right to put Awk into the one-liner category. It actually scales up remarkably well to a couple hundred lines or so, as long as the problem

I don’t think you’re right to put Awk into the one-liner category. It actually scales up remarkably well to a couple hundred lines or so, as long as the problem does not strain its anaemic data-structure capabilities. Compared to straight Python (i.e. not Numpy/pandas), it can also be surprisingly fast[1]. I experienced this personally on a trivial problem: take a TSV of (I,J) pairs, histogram I/J into a given number of bins. I can’t remember the exact figures now, but it went like this: on a five-gig file, pure Python is annoyingly slow, GNU awk is okayish but I still have to wait, mawk is fast enough that I don’t wait for it, C is of course still at least an order of magnitude faster but at that point it doesn’t matter. [1] https://brenocon.com/blog/2009/09/dont-mawk-awk-the-fastest-and-most-elegant-big-data-munging-language/ https://brenocon.com/blog/2009/09/dont-mawk-awk-the-fastest-...; note that the original author of mawk has made a release since then, at https://github.com/mikebrennan000/mawk-2 https://github.com/mikebrennan000/mawk-2, that doesn’t have the crashes I encountered with 64-bit builds of Dickey’s fork