I gave up on awk and always do perl one-liners. For basic stuff, they are about the same (perl _does_ have autosplit etc..) but every once in a while there is a

I gave up on awk and always do perl one-liners. For basic stuff, they are about the same (perl _does_ have autosplit etc..) but every once in a while there is a slightly more complex task, like detect first unique field, work with json, shell quote, etc.. This is still trivial in perl, but turns out super ugly (or impossible) in awk. And if I have to fallback to perl periodically, why bother with awk at all? It probably made sense in the past, when machines were slow and awk was way more popular; but that does not matter now. Might as well go with more powerful option.