I could preface a lot of this with 'kids these days', but... What you write is so true. So many large companies use text files to shuttle around data. I work

I could preface a lot of this with 'kids these days', but... What you write is so true. So many large companies use text files to shuttle around data. I worked at one place that used pipe-delimited 10+GB files. It's not sexy, and using awk/sed/cut seems like a hack at first, then you realize that it works and it is the simplest solution to the problem.