If I write more than about 50 bytes of awk I inevitably end up using perl instead because it's much more powerful. One example was I wanted to convert a column

If I write more than about 50 bytes of awk I inevitably end up using perl instead because it's much more powerful. One example was I wanted to convert a column in format a|b|c to ['a', 'b', 'c']. Doing that in awk is painful. In Perl, there's join and map, takes a few seconds.