Good question. I've been working with awk for several years now, and here's how I feel about it. AWK is old. 1977 old. Later versions that appeared (nawk and g

Good question. I've been working with awk for several years now, and here's how I feel about it. AWK is old. 1977 old. Later versions that appeared (nawk and gawk are the most common) helped make it a smoother language, but it's still a pain. There are definite features you will be missing in an awk script: - Any useful data structure slightly more complex than associative arrays. Try multi dimensional arrays, it's actually fun to do. Once. - Any useful programming construct to help manage with complexity of scripts longer than a few hundred lines. No classes, no variable scoping, no namespaces in general. Not to mention an extremely permissive compiler. - Any easy way to deal with the environment (other than text). Try sending http requests in awk, it can be a pain. In 2015, if you need to write a script you should almost always prefer python/ruby over awk. Now if you're asking whether you should learn awk? It comes in handy. There are a lot of awk scripts in the wild, and you may need to read them or edit them one day. Also, awk has a fun way of parsing input, which makes for very enjoyable one liners. Learning awk (and some complementary utilities like sed or find) turned me into a "oh, it can be done in a quick one-liner" kind of guy. Definitely recommended.