It’s my language of choice when building moderately complex scripts. Perl and python give you the illusion of power, and tempt you to write whole applications in those languages, whereas awk tends to run out of road. This is good, because it forces you to use a ‘real’ language like Java for the big apps.

I also use awk on the command line for really simple stuff, because I never can remember the syntax for ‘cut’.

Finally, I always type ‘gawk’ these days. In some distros awk is aliased to mawk, and mawk has let me down one time too many with some subtle bugs.

(Wow, that turned into a confession.)

Julian