One somewhat not-well-known thing with gawk is that it typically ships with some useful extensions that give you access to things like readdir(), ord(), chr(),

One somewhat not-well-known thing with gawk is that it typically ships with some useful extensions that give you access to things like readdir(), ord(), chr(), gettimeofday(), sleep(), etc. https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Extension-Samples.html https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Extension...