Myself, I only learned AWK rather recently and have gotten by for ages and ages with Perl for such tasks.

This is the opposite to me!

Back in the late 1980s (when programming books were really important;-) I remember eagerly reading the (grey) AWK Programming Language from cover to cover ... and loving it ... then along came the the pink camel, and I just couldn't bring myself to go back to the grey book after reading the pink one. :)

Seriously, I've argued successfully at multiple workplaces that it's better for an organisation to write everything in Perl rather than a motley mix of shell, awk and Perl because it scales so much better as programs (inevitably) grow from hundreds to thousands to hundreds of thousands lines of code.

See Also

• Unix shell versus Perl

• sed/awk/grep to Perl
• Need advice in for perl use as awk replacement
• Using Perl instead of awk!
• Awk and Perl unique features