Specifically, Awk is a good solution to a problem that should never have existed in the first place. Why am I having to write these bespoke parsers for the rand

Specifically, Awk is a good solution to a problem that should never have existed in the first place. Why am I having to write these bespoke parsers for the random mess of output formats that you get from the UNIX command line? Well, the fact is that I have to write such parsers. That's very sad, but has no chance of being fixed. So it's good to know Awk. I think Erik Naggum had this exact criticism of Perl.