awk is really, really powerful. It is fast, and you can do a lot very efficiently just playing with the &#x27;FS&#x27; variable. And you can find it on all *nix boxes. And it works nicely with cli other tools such as cut, paste, or datamash (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;datamash&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;datamash&#x2F;</a>).
As soon as it becomes too complex though it is better to resort to a real language (be it python, perl or whatever - my favourite is python + scipy).