Python isn't going to beat grep, but it beats awk in a lot of cases. (Cases that awk isn't well suited to, to be fair. Python doesn't beat awk for 99% of what

Python isn't going to beat grep, but it beats awk in a lot of cases. (Cases that awk isn't well suited to, to be fair. Python doesn't beat awk for 99% of what people use awk for.) It's faster than people think it is. Especially when you add in libraries like pandas, it's fantastic for data analysis. Of course, by the time you get to using pandas, you have to have everything in memory. This isn't true of python in general, though. For simpler tasks, you can easily write generators to read from stdin and write to stdout. I'm not saying that it's better for things like log parsing, but for more complicated ascii formats, I'd far rather use python than awk. That having been said, people who don't learn and use awk are missing out. It's a fantastic tool. I've just seen one too many unreadable, 1000-line awk programs to do something that's a dozen lines of python.