Right, which is sort of my point. 20 years ago, "everyone" knew perl, at least to the extent of knowing the standard idioms for different environments that you

Right, which is sort of my point. 20 years ago, "everyone" knew perl, at least to the extent of knowing the standard idioms for different environments that you're talking about. And in that world, "everyone" would choose perl for these tasks, knowing that everyone else would be expert enough to read and maintain them. Perl was the natural choice. And in a world where perl is a natural choice for these tasks, awk doesn't have a niche. Because at the end of the day awk is simply an inferior language. Which is the bit I find funny: we threw out and forgot about a great tool, and now we think that the ancestral toy it replaced is a good idea again.