No mention of vi or Sqlite? While I'm no vi expert it's a great tool for working with big files when you want to browse around without grep. And Sqlite is similarly ubiquitous and capable of crunching large files.
I use something like this to fix up column names and import:
sed -i '' -e '1 s/ \/ /_/g; 1 s/[() ]/_/g' $csv_file
sqlite3 $db_file <<SQL
.mode csv
.import $csv_file $table_name
SQL