I never use Awk until last year. I wanted to monitor an embedded device with little more than bustbox and python on it. There was quite a bit of information in the log files (I had already written a custom log file viewer with some highlighting) but I wanted to monitor in real-time. Somehow I decided to use Awk to monitor the tail of the log file and do realtime bar-graphs by generating appropriate cursor control sequences. In the end I had about 50 lines of Awk to upload to the board and run a command to pipe the log into it - very minimally invasive and very informative.
Would recommend learning Awk with some kind of real-world use of your own. BTW it reminded me of using XSLT which I think is another often overlooked "good thing".
Would recommend learning Awk with some kind of real-world use of your own. BTW it reminded me of using XSLT which I think is another often overlooked "good thing".