awk is a really productive constraint one can oblige to. If a problem looks like a text processing problem, use awk, and let the idioms set in. It is an awesome tool to have on one&#x27;s belt.<p>It is, in a sense, liberating to not have any library support for common problems: No need to learn a library (hej!) and, by the way, what you need in any given problem is an easy subset of what that library would do anyway.<p>Awk has made me focus more on the data there is to analyze, rather than the framework to analyze it with.<p>As the idiomatic use of awk is also very succinct, I hardly can imagine working efficiently on the command line without it.