It depends on what you want to do. Even for simple text processing in one-liners, there are quite a few common tasks that are difficult in awk. A big one for

It depends on what you want to do. Even for simple text processing in one-liners, there are quite a few common tasks that are difficult in awk. A big one for me is capture groups in regular expressions: perl -ne 'print $1 if /foo="(.*?)"/' awk '/foo=".*"/ { ??? }' You can do it with gawk, but it's ugly: gawk 'match($0, /foo="(.*?)"/, a) { print a[1] }' Another is manipulating hexadecimal numbers, which is also a gawk extension.