I use awk and sed (with tr&#x2F;sort&#x2F;uniq doing some heavy lifting) for most of my data analysis work. It&#x27;s a really great way to play around with data to get a feel for it before formalizing it in a different language.<p>For an interview, I wrote this guy to do a distributed-systems top-ten word count problem. It turned out to be much faster than anything else I wrote when combined with parallel. It&#x27;s eaiser to read when split into a bash script :) [0].<p><pre><code>  time &#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin&#x2F;parallel -Mx -j+0  -S192.168.1.3,: --block 3.5M --pipe --fifo --bg &quot;&#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin&#x2F;numactl -l &#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin&#x2F;mawk -vRS=&#x27;[^a-zA-Z0-9]+&#x27; &#x27;{a[tolower(\$1)]+=1} END { for(k in a) { print a[k],k} }&#x27;&quot; &lt; ~&#x2F;A* |  &#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin&#x2F;mawk &#x27;{a[$2]+=$1} END {for(k in a) {if (a[k] &gt; 1000) print a[k],k}}&#x27; | sort -nr | head -10
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[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;red-bin&#x2F;wc_fun&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;wordcount.sh" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;red-bin&#x2F;wc_fun&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;wordcount.sh</a>