good question. I never knew much about awk so I googled for a tutorial introduction and found these features as different:

1. awk can take different actions on each line by use of a series of

   pattern  { action }
   pattern  { action }
   [download]

   rules. C<desift> does not do different things on different lines based on the input text
2. awk is a complete language offering flow of control, functions and more. An entire webserver has been written in awk. Here is a simple program which takes small text delimited database and tabulates the amount of each type of computer:

   { computers[$1]++ }
       END  {  for ( name in computers )
                        print  "The number of ",name,"computers is",compu
   +ters[name]
                  }
   [download]