I use awk all the time, but generally only to conveniently pull a particular field out of data that I’m workin with. Regardless of the separator used, awk makes it easy to extract just what you need.

I love chaining commands as much as anyone, and sed, awk, grep, and perl are some of my best friends. However, remember that, in *nix, each command runs in its own process, the resources required for ...