I've written AWK programs that perform decidedly non-trivial manipulations on data, and none of the problems you describe are real. It is absolutely not the cas

I've written AWK programs that perform decidedly non-trivial manipulations on data, and none of the problems you describe are real. It is absolutely not the case that one must shell out to a pipeline of other commands to get work done; you can write structured programs in AWK just as you would in any other scripting language, and operate in multiple passes over data. It's a very amusing irony if a Perl enthusiast genuinely believes that AWK can only be used in the form of cryptic one-liners, especially in the context of POSIX tools one "must" learn.